Monday, October 21, 2024
From Ian:
Andrew Pessin: How to end the hundred years war on Israel?
Andrew Pessin: How to end the hundred years war on Israel?
After several decades of a successful legal career, David Friedman became the U.S. ambassador to Israel in 2017 under then-President Donald Trump and orchestrated major diplomatic advances, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and helping to broker the 2020 Abraham Accords. In his new book, One Jewish State, Friedman presents ongoing challenges and obstacles, which has already inspired a new party vying for seats in the upcoming World Zionist Congress elections aptly named One Jewish State.How a year of hatred sparked a Jewish renaissance
Friedman challenges “the most widely accepted but fatally flawed concept in Middle Eastern diplomacy: the two-state solution.” Though the two-state appeal from a certain perspective is clear, the case against it, from the pro-Israel perspective, is compelling. The Palestinians just don’t want it. They never have. The Palestinian leadership and most Palestinians do not accept the existence of a Jewish state in any borders. Any state given to them will only advance their agenda of destroying the Jewish state. If that wasn’t clear before the massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, it is indisputably clear now. Israel gifted them Gaza, and Hamas used it to produce mass murder. That is what they did with their proto-“state” and what they say they will do with any future state.
For anyone who supports Israel and the right of Jews to live in this region in safety, a Palestinian state should be a non-starter.
So, what’s left if we jettison the two-state solution? Basically “one state.”
One Palestinian state “from the river to the sea” is obviously off the table for the pro-Israel side. Friedman does not consider a “binational state,” but one can speculate why: That is not a Jewish state, and his starting point is that there must be a Jewish state. That leaves, then, the “one Jewish state.” The basic idea is that Israel must exert its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria. (Gaza is a separate and difficult case, as Friedman acknowledges in a chapter devoted to it, which we shall not treat here.)
In addition to the main negative argument above, there are positive arguments for the idea. These boil down to this: Only under Israeli sovereignty will Palestinians be able to lead full lives of dignity and prosperity, ultimately producing a peaceful outcome for all. Israel is a vibrant democracy “with a track record of respecting the civil, religious and human rights of its minority population, almost all of which is Arab.” Most Arab-Israeli citizens “patriotically support living in their country,” where their standard of living, opportunities and prosperity are orders of magnitude greater than that of their Arab neighbors in surrounding countries, including in the territories administered by Palestinians themselves. The idea is to extend the same situation—i.e., Israeli sovereignty, to the Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria.
With one essential difference. Israeli Arabs are full citizens of Israel with equal rights. Palestinians in Judea and Samaria cannot be. A secure Jewish state cannot swap the security risk posed by Palestinians in Judea and Samaria for the demographic risk of making them full citizens. They may become “residents” of Israel but cannot become full citizens.
Here we reach the point at which critics will explode, “Apartheid!”
Friedman addresses this through a deep dive into the case of Puerto Rico, which he sees as a possible model for the “One Jewish State.” Roughly, Puerto Ricans stand to the United States as Palestinians in Judea and Samaria might stand to Israel. The United States has sovereignty while Puerto Ricans have extensive rights of self-government but not collective national rights to vote in U.S. elections. Why does it work? Because Puerto Ricans live better than they would if they were entirely independent. They derive political, economic and civil benefits, and enjoy all the same basic civil rights as any U.S. citizen but pay less in federal taxes in exchange for not being full citizens. With Israeli sovereignty, Palestinians would have the civil rights guaranteed by Israel’s Basic Law on Human Dignity without the collective right to self-determination; they would pay less Israeli taxes; and they would not vote in national elections.
Friedman also asks which is a better option for Palestinians: Creating a Palestinian state that is likely both to fail by every metric and be overrun by terrorists and thus reproducing Gaza or absorbing those living in Judea and Samaria under Israeli sovereignty and providing them resident status?
When it came to attending the March Against Antisemitism in November, Rollinson was initially “nervous. I had an intrinsic fear that something would happen, but having felt isolated at times, I wanted to be around people who understood. It was an amazing feeling.” Since October 7, she has also started wearing a Star of David around her neck for the first time.Seth Mandel: How Terrorist Cutouts Colonize the Campus
Here, Rollinson is in good company. Actress Felicity Kendall has worn hers every day too. She recently explained that soon after the massacre she was walking through a London park when a Jewish woman approached her and thanked her for wearing a Star of David around her neck. “I was quite taken aback. Would people say anything like that to someone wearing a cross or a turban? It made me think, right, I am wearing this all the time now, and I do,” she said in a July interview. She also attends synagogue weekly. A year on, she tells the Telegraph: “It gives me peace and a routine of meditative thinking.’’
Across the UK, Jews are seeking solace – and not just in their social lives. Anti-Semitism in the workplace has emerged as a new issue over the past year. Dave Rich is head of policy at the Community Security Trust, which protects British Jews from anti-Semitism and related threats. “Lots of workplaces and employment sectors now have new Jewish WhatsApp networks that emerged after October 7. Jewish employees need a space to discuss everything that has been happening,” he says.
Ruth* recently set up a group in her company. “Immediately after October 7, I felt really uneasy about going into the office,” she says. “Everybody there knows I’m Jewish and a Zionist, so I felt very self-conscious.” Her colleagues were going on pro-Palestinian marches and although they never said it outright, she felt there was a feeling amongst them that the Hamas attacks were somehow justified, which she found deeply offensive. “My boss was very understanding, but said there wasn’t anything she could do, and that I could work from home when and if I needed to.”
But Ruth didn’t want to shy away. In the end, she and a colleague set up a dedicated Jewish network. “It gives us a feeling of solidarity, despite the pervading unfriendly atmosphere amongst some of my colleagues,” she says.
So affected was former bookshop-owner Joanna De Guia by the relationship with colleagues in her industry, that she changed careers entirely. “I was hurt and angry by the silence of my friends who worked in publishing,” she says. “After October 7, I waited for my “allies” – such as those in the gay community – to jump in and support me. I have hundreds of people in my social circle, but barely 10 contacted me. So I either left my comfortable spaces, or felt pushed out.”
Rewind to September last year and De Guia, a married mother of one, lived a similar way to many Jews in Britain. “I was Left-leaning and barely celebrated the Jewish festivals,” she says. Nor – like many Jews in this country – did de Guia think very much about Israel. “I’d been for a couple of beach holidays in my late teens,” she says. “But I didn’t feel particularly politically aligned with the country.” October 7 changed that.
De Guia eventually sold her business and now works full-time at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, combating anti-Semitism on university campuses. “Our goal is to change the weather in British universities,” she says. Universities in particular have been a difficult arena for young Jews, with pro-Gaza encampments hollering against “genocide”, and demanding their administrations cut ties with Zionists. In the meantime students have found comfort in university Jewish societies. President of the Union of Jewish Students Sami Berkoff explains: “Students have needed somewhere to join with other Jewish students and just be. Jewish students have as much of a right as any other to have the full student experience.”
Rabbi Naftali Schiff, the founder and executive director of Jewish Futures, a family of 10 educational and social organisations dedicated to engaging young Jewish people in a positive way, has also found that engagement has been unprecedented. “Over the past year, we’ve arranged dozens of Friday night meals for students on campuses across the country and events for young professionals,” he says.
“Like many people, I was shocked at the level of vitriolic hate that punctuated some elements of the demonstrations in the streets and on the campuses after October 7,” he says. “Let’s just say it’s been a trip down the memory lane of anti-Semitism. Young Jews have felt targeted, experiencing disconcerting levels of concern, especially on campuses. For the first time in my own life, when waiting at an airport with my beard and a yarmulke [skullcap], I found myself looking over my shoulder with a genuine sense of anxiety.”
However, Rabbi Schiff strongly feels that “the UK is a wonderful place to live as Jews. It’s easy to look at the darkness, however the authorities by and large have been very sympathetic to our concerns and I am confident we shall turn this corner.’’
Since October he has kept two treasured items in his pocket: “A cigarette case, which my grandfather received when demobbed from national service in the First World War, and my father’s dog tags from the Second World War.” Both are symbols of his British pride. Rabbi Schiff adds: “It’s a reminder that we are privileged to live in a liberal democracy and a reminder to be appreciative that in Britain we can live freely as Jewish people, contributing to society as we go. I feel grateful to live in a country like Britain.”
In other words, all the relevant information about Samidoun was known. That’s why, in fact, Columbia suspended four students associated with the “Resistance 101” event on campus and evicted them from university housing facilities. (They had been warned in advance multiple times not to host the event.)
Samidoun, then, is part of a much larger problem. These types of organizations, whether officially designated as terrorist entities or not, have the same aims and the same general practices and certainly the same worldview—and get cash from the same sources and through the same progressive dark-money-donor clearinghouses. Samidoun itself will get taken off the donee list now (one hopes), but it will be replaced by an identical organization. There’s a whack-a-mole element to the pro-Palestinian cutouts in the West, and it enables groups like the PFLP to stay one step ahead of the very governments that have already banned them but can’t seem to stop them from raising money.
For legal purposes, of course, the terrorism designation means everything. But from the standpoint of basic societal decency, the designation changes nothing. The progressive protest movement and America’s elite universities are full of well-funded extremist groups going on recruiting sprees.
In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that the “wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses came on suddenly and shocked people across the nation. But the political tactics underlying some of the demonstrations were the result of months of training, planning and encouragement by longtime activists and left-wing groups.”
Samidoun was but one of those groups—albeit one unconcerned with subtlety. “There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas,” Kates said. “These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine.” She added that America’s university students and activists must “build an international popular cradle of the resistance.”
Among the other groups helping plan and train the future resistors of America were the national Students for Justice in Palestine, whose individual chapters have been among the most brazenly anti-Semitic and pro-violence participants in the tentifada.
At UCLA’s pro-Hamas encampment, members of Faculty for Justice in Palestine “had organized self-defense teams on the front lines.” One of the affiliated professors compared the current generation of goonish anti-Zionist trainees favorably to his own: “We had a lot of affect and feeling. But there’s a different kind of rigor to these students that is really striking.”
The triumph of terrorist front groups in recruiting and training and fund-raising is a success story to some and a cautionary tale to others. American institutions are increasingly treating it as the former.
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