Caroline Glick: Israel has made it, now it needs to grow up
At independence, Israel was little more than a spark of light – a tiny spark – in the Jewish world. From a total of 11.5 million Jews alive on the 5th of the month of Iyyar in the Jewish year 5708, (May 14, 1948), only 650,000, or 6% lived in Israel. In contrast, the day Israel was founded, some five million, or 43% of world Jewry were living in the United States.Melanie Phillips: Isi Liebler's moral courage
Fast forward 73 years and that little spark of light is now the sun in the Jewish solar system. With 6.9 million Jews out of a total of 14.9 million, not only is Israel the largest Jewish community in the world by far with 47% of world Jewry living within its boundaries, by 2030, the majority of world Jewry will be living in the Jewish state.
As for America, although half a million Jews immigrated to the US since Israel was founded, the total number of Jews in America stands today at a mere 5.7 million. American Jewry has been reduced to just 38% of the world Jewish population. The implications are straightforward. Since 1948, virtually all of the growth in the Jewish world population has happened and is continuing to happen in Israel.
Israel's transformation into the center of the Jewish world isn't just a question of demographics. Most Torah learning that is happening in the world is happening in Israel. Most Jewish literature is being written in Israel. Jewish advances in everything from medicine to economics and business, to science, engineering, culinary arts, visual arts and more are happening in Israel. Jewish history is being researched in Israel and is being made in Israel. Israel is the present of the Jewish people and the future of the Jewish people.
Aside from everything else, this state of affairs exposes the manifest stupidity of the claim that anti-Zionism is anything other than antisemitism.
Although Israel's position at the center of the Jewish world is undeniable, it has gone largely unnoticed by most Israelis. Most of the Israelis who are engaged with Diaspora Jewry continue to act as though Israel – with a per capita GDP higher than Japan's – is an underpopulated, impoverished backwater that cannot survive without the support of our wealthy and more secure brethren in America, Australia or France.
So too, most Israelis are unaware of the revolution the country has brought to Judaism itself. In the space of three generations, Israelis have taken their grandparents' practices from the ghettos of Europe and the melachs of North Africa and Arabia and turned them into a dynamic, eclectic living, breathing creed. Judaism is the rhythm of life in Israel. In every neighborhood, village and town, the Judaism that is lived in Israel has an electric vibrance. Israeli music, fashion, customs, prayer, settlement, religious studies, agriculture, and cooking are separately and together expressions of a spiritual renewal the likes of which no one imagined, or planned.
It is the organic outgrowth of the reunification of the people of Israel and their faith in their land. Few have noticed any of this or considered its spiritual and cultural significance, let alone recognized its potential.
The reformation of Jewish life is not Israel's only huge achievement that has been largely overlooked and underappreciated by the people of Israel. They have also largely missed the transformation of Israel's global position. The ongoing domestic debate regarding the goal of Israel's policies in relation to Iran's nuclear program is a testament to this lack of national self-awareness.
The death in Jerusalem of Isi Leibler at the age of 86 has robbed the Jewish world of one of its towering figures at a time when it is particularly ill-equipped for such a loss.Eventbrite Removes San Francisco State University-Sponsored Webinar With Palestinian Terrorist Leila Khaled
Leibler, who was head of the Australian Jewish community before he immigrated to Israel, became a multi-millionaire global Jewish leader who was influential for decades on the international stage. His efforts helped pave the way for diplomatic relations to be established between Israel and China and for full diplomatic relations between Israel and India.
Counting Benjamin Netanyahu as a personal friend, he didn't flinch from criticizing Israel's prime minister in public – and reportedly to his face – when he thought Netanyahu was getting things badly wrong.
He gathered round his Shabbat table like-minded thinkers, writers, academics and public figures who could help supply his voracious need to inform himself ever more widely, as well as bolster what increasingly felt like the resistance movement of the Jewish people against a world spinning off its moral and political compass.
Leibler is perhaps best known for his seminal role in the campaign to free Soviet Jewry and his single-handed battles against the World Jewish Congress.
In 1959, he launched a press and lobbying campaign that brought the plight of Soviet Jewry first before the Australian parliament and then to the United Nations. Arguably, no other individual made a more significant contribution to the eventual exodus of the Soviet Jews some three decades later.
Eventbrite has removed a San Francisco State University-sponsored event featuring Leila Khaled — a member of US-designated terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — from its platform for violating its terms of service.
The move comes after The Algemeiner reported that SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicity and Diaspora Studies (AMED) program was planning an April 23 Zoom webinar, facilitated by the Eventbrite platform, featuring Khaled as a speaker.
“Eventbrite is committed to empowering event organizers to gather for their chosen purpose, so long as they don’t violate our Terms. Due to one of the speaker’s affiliation with a foreign terrorist organization, this event violates our Terms of Service, so we have removed it from our platform,” an Eventbrite spokesperson wrote in an e-mailed response to The Algemeiner.
The April 23 event, “Whose Narratives? What Free Speech for Palestine?”, is co-sponsored by SFSU’s AMED program and moderated by the university’s Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, who has previously been criticized by Jewish groups for her rhetoric against pro-Israel students. It marks the second attempt by the organizers to host an event with Khaled as a speaker. In September 2020, an online seminar featuring Khaled — who took part in the hijacking of a Tel Aviv-bound commercial flight in 1969 — was dropped by Facebook and the videoconferencing provider Zoom, and was taken down from YouTube after partially airing.
Asked about the April 23 event, a Zoom spokesperson told The Algemeiner that the company was “reviewing the facts of this event to determine if it is consistent with our Terms of Service and Community Standards and will decide on an appropriate course of action after that review.”