Tuesday, August 10, 2021
From Ian:
‘We may lose US’ if liberal Jews continue backing BDS, BLM — Diaspora minister
75 years on, harsh British detention of Holocaust survivors in Cyprus remembered
‘We may lose US’ if liberal Jews continue backing BDS, BLM — Diaspora minister
Diaspora Affairs Minister Nachman Shai warned last week that if liberal American Jews continue supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions and Black Lives Matter movements, Jerusalem may lose the support of the United States altogether.Israel Advocacy Movement: Are progressive Jews abandoning Israel?
Making a guest appearance on the American Jewish Committee’s People of the Pod podcast, Shai said he recently briefed fellow members of the Israeli government on the status of American Jewry, telling them that “if we see more of the radical left and progressive liberal Jews continuing to support BDS and Black Lives Matter, and similar to the Palestinians… relat[ing] to Israel as a genocide state or an apartheid state, we may lose America.”
Israel has long identified the BDS movement as a significant threat against which millions of dollars have been invested, but the lumping of the boycott movement together with the Black Lives Matter movement is less common.
Some major Jewish organizations in the US have expressed opposition to statements and positions made by some BLM activists. However, the movement has won the support of many US Jews, and the Anti-Defamation League has spoken out against portraying its supporters as “violent extremists.”
Over 600 Jewish organizations, representing the majority of American Jews, signed a letter in support of the Black Lives Matter movement that was published in a full-page New York Times ad in August 2020.
Shai said “there were ideas to rely on other groups in America today” for support, instead of American Jewry, but that he rejects such proposals. He appeared to be referring to recent remarks made by former Israeli ambassador to the US Ron Dermer who suggested that Israel should prioritize the “passionate and unequivocal” support of evangelical Christians over that of American Jews, who he said are “disproportionately among our critics.”
The data suggests that Reform Jews are less likely to be emotionally attached to Israel than Orthodox Jews and more and more appear to take more hostile positions on Israel.
We explore whether this is the case and what can be done to strengthen the bond between Diaspora Jews and the State of Israel.
We're joined by Rabbi Haim Shalom, Rabbi Lea Mühlstein and Josh Howie (@joshxhowie)
75 years on, harsh British detention of Holocaust survivors in Cyprus remembered
After surviving the Holocaust, trekking the Alps in winter and crossing the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat, Rose Lipszyc clearly remembers her months incarcerated in harsh British camps in Cyprus.When Hitler’s Mufti Gave a Press Conference
“After all that, we were back behind barbed wire again,” 92-year-old Lipszyc said, speaking 75 years after British soldiers began imprisoning Jews on the eastern Mediterranean island, dark events whose legacy resonates today.
Lipszyc’s family, from the Polish city of Lublin, were among the six million Jews the Nazis massacred during World War II.
She escaped death using false papers, working as a forced laborer in Germany.
After the war, she walked to Italy. Then, joining an exodus of thousands of traumatized refugees dreaming of a Jewish nation, Lipszyc boarded a rickety boat in Venice bound for British-run Palestine.
“There were 300 of us squeezed into the boat,” Lipszyc said. “We were like sardines.”
But as the shores of Palestine appeared on the horizon, two British warships powered out.
“The English soldiers — who I would have kissed the feet of for liberating me in Germany — were leaping into our little boat with batons,” she said, her voice trembling.
By the 1960s, however, Husseini’s position had deteriorated considerably. Rejecting peace and any accommodation with Zionism, his forces had tried — and failed — to destroy Israel during its 1948 War of Independence. Husseini no longer had a great power patron and was reliant on support from Egypt and later Saudi Arabia. Nonetheless, he lived in comparative luxury with a retinue of staff, including a driver for his limousine, and constantly plotted against the Jewish state and the West.
Meir wanted Gideon Hausner, the Israeli Attorney General and prosecutor at Eichmann’s trial, to tie the infamous Nazi to Husseini, and thereby “link Israel’s Arab enemies to the Nazis.” Hausner had Avraham Zellinger, who did research for the trial, investigate the relationship between the two men. Zellinger found an entry in the Mufti’s diary which speaks of the “best of the Arab friends” with the name “Eichmann” written underneath it. But the court, Klagsbrun noted, “went no further than to recognize that Eichmann had met the Mufti once, with no evidence of a close relationship between them.”
It was against this backdrop that Amin al-Husseini held a March 4, 1961, press conference in Beirut. The Mufti, CIA cables reveal, “categorically denied any connection with the persecution of Jews in Germany during the Second World War.” He claimed that “all allegations in this respect were baseless and they were prompted by Zionists’ enmity toward him and the Palestinian national movement.”
The Mufti also distributed a statement in response to a recent book on Eichmann by the American journalist Quentin Reynolds, which alleged that Husseini had several contacts with the SS officer and had toured Nazi death camps. Husseini “said that he did not know Eichmann and that he had no connection whatsoever with him.” Further, “neither he nor any other Arab had plans in the past or at present to annihilate any race, Jews or others.” Husseini closed out the press conference by asserting that “what the Jews have done” in Israel “is similar to what the Nazis did to them in Germany” — a libel that is still echoed by antisemites today.
Husseini’s press conference was replete with lies.
Husseini was well aware of Hitler’s plans for European Jewry. Indeed, he hoped to replicate them in the Middle East.
In his own memoirs, the Mufti recorded a November 28, 1941, meeting with Hitler: “Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews.”
“The answer I got was: ‘The Jews are yours.’”
Many apologists, journalists, and academics spent decades denying that Husseini visited concentration camps, but in 2017, conclusive photographic evidence emerged showing Husseini touring the Trebbin camp near Berlin.
