From The River to the Sea. ISRAEL Shall Remain Free
I worked for the United Jewish Appeal from 1980 to 1983. During that period, I was the National Director for Small and Non-Federated Communities, so I am speaking now from an expert’s perspective. I also have very close ties to various Muslim communities and actually lived in a Sufi community in Boston from 1998 to 2005, so I also understand the Islamic perspective from direct experience, not from news broadcasts and social media.
I am absolutely and furiously disgusted by ill-informed American Jews demonstrating against Israel and in favor of Hamas on college campuses.
Claiming to be supporting the Palestinian people by supporting Hamas is a joke. Without Hamas, there would be no “war” at all and the people of Gaza would be going on about their daily lives free of this nightmare. Therefore, any demonstrations claiming to support the Palestinian people of Gaza behind a banner that reads, “From the River to the Sea PALESTINE Shall Be Free,” is actually and fervently supporting Hamas , another in a long line of absentee landlords who make their lavish livings by oppressing the Palestinians in Gaza and causing the Israelis to rain hellfire down on them. It is deeply antisemitic, even when the people who are doing it are Jews. (It is no secret that Jews are sometimes the worst antisemites.)
The Israeli incursion into Gaza was an absolute necessity to reclaim the hostages that Hamas still holds and to end the continuing missile and drone attacks on Southern Israel.
Until the hostages are freed, and the missiles stop flying, Israel has no choice but to continue this incursion. The fact that many thousands of Jews in Israel are protesting against the Netanyahu government’s necessary (and admittedly despicable) actions speaks to the depth that the Palestinian propaganda machine has infected the national conversation in Israel itself and the extent to which some Israeli Jews do not understand the situation.
Speak to some of the two million Israeli Palestinians, Muslims and Christians, who live and work in Israel, own homes and businesses, vote, serve in the government and fight in Israel’s armed forces They do not want to live under the PLO or Hamas because they know that they are the only Palestinians in the Middle East who do not live under dictatorial oppression…..and they don’t want to trade the freedom they enjoy as Israeli citizens for the oppression they will experience under Hamas or the PLO. The fact that Israeli Palestinians have not risen up en masse against the government of Israel speaks volumes about the reality of the situation.
Asserting that Israel is a “colonial, apartheid” invader in Palestinian territory is a fraudulent misuse of the terms “colonial” and “apartheid.” (The fact that Nelson Mandela said so doesn’t make it true.) To call Israel’s reasonable defense of its sovereign territory “genocide” changes the meaning of genocide, a word coined in 1943 by a Jewish Holocaust survivor. As long as there are millions of Palestinians living outside of the state of Israel, it is impossible for Israel to commit genocide against Palestinians. (Genocide is an attempt to absolutely destroy a given people – a genus – by exterminating them.)
For any Jew to endorse such beliefs is indicative of a wholesale failure to educate the Jewish people about the reality of their situation.
To hear American Jews chanting, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall Be Free” is an insult to the Jewish people….and it is a sign of rampant insanity among a segment of ultra-liberal Jews who are so far to the left that they have actually made a common cause with those on the extreme right, and the ultra-orthodox Jewish community that has always been opposed to the foundation of the modern state of Israel on specious halachic grounds….because it didn’t happen in coordination of the coming of the Messiah.
For Israelis to oppose this “war” is even worse. For them to agree with those who chant, “From the River to the Sea Palestine Shall Be Free” is not just treason. It is insane because they are supporting those who are calling for a new holocaust to kill the Jews who live in Israel.
In 1938, no country of succor (outside the reach of the Third Reich) except for the diminutive Dominican Republic opened its doors to Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi juggernaut. During World War II, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Amin al-Husayni (189?-1974)), was a Nazi collaborator. During the war, he lived in Berlin and Rome, consorted with Hitler and Mussolini and encouraged the Holocaust.
Today, in 2024, there is still nowhere for eight million Israelis to go. No country will take eight million refugees, even rich ones. No country will accept one million refugees. (Theoretically, the United States would have to take them because virtually every Israeli citizen has at least one relative living in the United States but theory and practice are two different things.)
Calls for the two-state solution are another joke. There is already a Palestinian nation in the Middle East. It is called the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, where Palestinians live as second class citizens Jordan, an ally of Israel’s, refuses to merge with the West Bank because they don’t want the PLO in Jordan. Egypt will not absorb Gaza because Egyptians are not Arabs and they don’t want to accept a large Arab community into their already turbulent country.
Jews have lived in Israel for more than four thousand years. As an atheist, I give no credibility to the biblical assertion that God gave Canaan to the Jews, but I give great credibility to history. The ancient Israelites settled in Canaan, interbred with the indigenous residents of the region (probably because they had previous ties to one another) and became the Jewish people.
The expulsion of the Jewish people from Jerusalem by Rome in 70 ACE resulted in the two millennia long diaspora, during which the Jewish people became the second most raped nation in human history, after the African slaves in the New World, which accounts for the crazy quilt of Jewish DNA….but that came after two previous expulsions including the Babylonian Captivity, that had already scrambled the Jewish gene pool.
The fact remains, however, that the Jewish people were expelled from Jerusalem, not from the whole of Israel, renamed Syria Palestina by the Romans. Some Jewish families have lived continuously in Israel for more than four thousand years. The Palestinians did not exist until they were created by the British in 1918. Before that, they were Bedu or former Bedu living in settled villages.
The land that the Palestinians want back was never theirs to begin with. The Turkish Ottoman Empire ruled Israel from 1517 to 1917, when the British took over and, during that period all of the land in Israel was owned by mostly absentee Turks. The local Bedu were sharecroppers or tenant farmers, although some purchased their plots of land from their Turkish landlords. Great Britain continued to honor Turkish deeds and it wasn’t until 1948 that the Turkish deeds were cancelled when the state of Israel was established. (Turkish animosity toward Israel dates from this event.)
From 1858 on,, the Ottomans allowed rich families from other Arab countries to purchase land in Israel. They also had a law on the books that allowed tenant farmers to claim the land they worked after ten years of continuous occupancy. (Turkish landowners developed a practice of relocating their tenant farmers to different plots of land every ten years to prevent their tenants from claiming the land.) That law remained on the books until 2012 when the Israeli Supreme Court overturned it, which prevented both Muslim and Jewish settlers from claiming lands they worked as tenant farmers.
Into this horrendously complicated situation (In Israel, some plots of land have Roman, Egyptian, Templar, French, Turkish, British and Israeli deeds), a bunch of ill-informed, deliberately misled demonstrators being led by Russian agents provocateurs are being used to shatter the unity of the American Jewish Community while at the same time, fracturing the Democratic party into pro- and anti-Israel camps and raising doubts about President Biden’s ability to to carry Michigan, a vital swing state with a large Muslim population.
The Muslim Americans are incensed that the United States continues to supplies arms and ammunition to Israel…but they don’t say a word about the murders of innocent civilians, including women and children, the kidnappings, rapes, and tortures of Israelis (including American Jews) committed by Hamas. They also ignore the fact that the United States has treaty obligations to Israel but has no such obligations to Hamas.
As long as they march behind banners proclaiming “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free,” these demonstrators are demonstrating behind the merger of Nazi propaganda with Russia’s imperialist ambitions.
Russia, you see, wants Trump back in office because they believe they can manipulate Trump into cutting off aid to Ukraine. America’s closest allies believe that is exactly what will happen if Trump is re-elected., which is precisely why the Russians are trying to make that happen.
The Hamas attack on Southern Israel was instigated by Russia through Iran for this express purpose,, to weaken Biden and shove Trump back into the White House.
So, no. any Jew who marches behind a banner that reads, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall Be Free” deserves to be expelled from any Jewish organization to which he, she or it belongs. No congregation should allow such people to sit among them. Other Jews should have nothing to do with such people because they are a cancerous growth that must be cut out before it spreads.
And anyone who believes that this is about anti-Israel sentiments having nothing to do with antisemitism is either an idiot or a fool. This is just an excuse for the antisemites to come out and play under the cover of supposedly worthy cause that allows them to express and demonstrate their antisemitism under the cover of a supposedly ethical opposition to Israel’s natural right to defend itself.
Shortly before his death, I was speaking with my father about what it was like to be a Jew before Israel came into being and what it was like after that.
He said, “Before Israel, we were always ashamed of ourselves. No matter where we went, we could always feel the hate. I felt it during basic training in the Army….and my C.O. in basic was a Jew. After Israel came into existence, that changed. We weren’t ashamed any more. Israel changed us all.”
04/24/2024 @ 3:53 pm
I agree wholeheartedly.
I would only make one point differently, and it is in support of your case. “As long as there are millions of Palestinians are living outside of the state of Israel, it is impossible for Israel to commit genocide against Palestinians.” I would make the exact opposite point. What proves more than anything that Israel isn’t committing genocide against Palestinians is that millions of Palestinians are living INSIDE the state of Israel. Here I do not include the territories, even though technically they are inside Israel. There are two million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who are in no danger at all, at least not from Israel. If Israel were genocidal toward Palestinians, this would probably be the first targeted population. The Nazis did not kill Polish Jews while sparing German Jews; they killed Jews. That’s how genocide works. It is the Israeli Palestinian population that most convincingly supports the case against genocide.
My feelings about Jews who support “from the river to the sea” is identical to yours. I think they are fools and traitors who do not bother being informed about their own people. When, several years ago, I started looking more closely at the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I expected that as I learned things I’d develop more Palestinian sympathies. The exact opposite happened. The more I learned, the more Zionist I became, mainly because double standards against Jews became more and more and more blatant and, worse, more and more and more accepted. And I didn’t get here from what might be called Hasbara sources, which I have generally ignored, even though I was accused of parroting them frequently during Open Salon. I wasn’t reading them at all. A lot of it came when I started to look things up and what I found increased my support of Israel. One I wasn’t aware of had to do with the Jewish Quarter. I finally realized I should figure out where it was. When I discovered it was in East Jerusalem, my feelings about any divided Jerusalem changed drastically, and also when I found out how it was eliminated. I didn’t initially know that Transjordan did not include any of Jerusalem or the West Bank. Perhaps the biggest revelation for me was when I started looking into how many Jews were left in the Arab world compared to how many Palestinians are Israeli citizens, and those numbers are shocking. Israel, with a population roughly the size of metro Chicago and a territory roughly the size of New Jersey, has two million Arab citizens, while the entire Arab world combined, with a population of over 450 million and over five million square miles, has a combined Jewish population of under four thousand. This becomes a bigger deal when you find out that the Jewish refugee population from Arab countries was larger than the Arab refugee population from Israel. I was also very struck by the knowledge, which I picked up watching a PA official being asked this, that the PA does not accept Jews by policy, period, even if those Jews had continuous ancestry in Palestine from modern times. Jews are the only continuously Palestinian population who are not considered Palestinians by Palestinian entities. These people are too crazy to take advantage of the propaganda possibilities of extending citizenship offers to Naturei Karta or to any of those Jews demonstrating in their favor on American campuses. When we look at the asymmetry of bigotry, I can only come up with one answer as to why on Earth it is ignored.
What else gets ignored, and this is generally true about the West, is that the West – and Israel, even though it is not majority Western – is the only area where bigotry is intrinsically considered an immoral thing. People expressing bigotry often lower their voices. They don’t in the Middle East – or the Far East for that matter. We watch the phony efforts of Westerners trying to say that there really is a distinction between antizionism and antisemitism but there is no such distinction in the Arab world, and that lack of distinction is what is being imported onto American campuses.
The United States is my country. I have great grandparents born here. The earliest evidence I have of my family’s presence in America is my great great grandfather’s citizenship papers from 1866. (Yes, a lot of my family came in way later, the most recent from Poland in August of 1939.) I have never sought Israeli citizenship because I have a country. I was never that worried about Israel as a political entity; I was worried about Jews; but I just can’t get around the mountains of evidence that opposition to Israeli existence is strictly based on its being primarily Jewish and nothing else.
And so I agree with you.
04/24/2024 @ 4:50 pm
I was wondering where you would come into this discussion and you fulfilled my expectations. Your arguments are very supportive, which is why this format makes sense, and Facebook really doesn’t. It is impossible to carry on a nuanced conversation on Facebook. Looking forward to Bill’s comments.
The challenge for us is to not stand aside but rather to be as vocal as possible. I am no longer able to demonstrate. Can’t walk far enough to make a difference…but no one is going to walk over me.
04/24/2024 @ 5:44 pm
I probably have less political street experience than anyone on this site. A lot less. I have not led a life of political activism. I vote, I’ve done a tiny bit of canvassing, some letters to the editor, some personal conversations, a bit of protesting in my youth. Nothing like your experience. I’ve had a highly apolitical occupation all my life and, being in sales, I have had to be careful. I do better online.
Where I do most of this now is Quora. That format is mainly instead of blog posts people pose questions, and the answers are formatted a lot like here. Most of my answers are on Jewish or Zionist topics, though some of the most viewed ones are neither. I’ve asked an occasional question to make a point, such as (paraphrased) What degree of oppression would drive you to do what Hamas did on October 7? In threads I’ve gotten into arguments with Palestinians and a whole lot of antizionists, and I learn things from some things Israelis say in threads. It’s not that I develop relationships like here, but I’m averaging I think somewhat above half a million views a year. Most answers get hardly anything. Sometimes one hits big, and I don’t generally know beforehand which ones will. (If you’re ever over there, I go by Kosh there.) I like it mainly because of its reach. Also, a lot of the time I find myself saying things that I don’t see other people saying. There’s a restricted area where you can get paid for answers but my attitude is that the point is to be widely read if you think your message is important. It’s weird what I don’t see people say; for example, pointing out that the people who criticize Israel’s existence are the very people who make Israel’s existence necessary. No one else is even pointing out that the main reason Israel exists isn’t religious at all; it’s to provide Jewish safety and to provide a place where unsafe Jews can go, which is the biggest Jewish need the Holocaust brought to the surface. The big story of the Holocaust is the story of the St. Louis. The biggest related story is that no nation took any military action specifically on behalf of Jews, like bombing the rail lines to the camps. The countries most eminent for helping Jews are eminent for helping their own Jews, typically small populations, like Denmark, Finland, Bulgaria, and the Serbs. In response to someone who asked why Jews had a right to a state, I said that those who didn’t help the Jews in times of dire need have no moral voice with Jews about what we had to and have to do for safety in the absence of their help, and that their opposition to our solution is anything but surprising. I got an outpouring of supportive comments when I said that, and I got it because saying that is so unusual. That’s really why I do this. I could express the same opinions I see and essentially vote, but when people are surprised by what I say or how I say it then I know I’m providing something of specific value, getting them to think about something in a way they haven’t thought about it before, which will serve them when they have to make their own cases in person, in writing, wherever. That’s really the reason I write at all.
04/24/2024 @ 8:07 pm
I agree with you…mostly. I’d say that my agreement is around 75 to 80 percent. It is hard to quantify. I agree with the basic thrust of the separate arguments within, and your conclusion, however, the structure has serious flaws and those flaws can be merely structural, or they can be structural deception. Either way, they can’t get agreement. I’ll give examples.
Before I get to that, I want to include something about John McWhorter. You are probably both familiar with him. He’s a professor at Columbia. I dislike everything about McWhorter. I can’t recall when I last agreed with him. I agree with McWhorter’s opinion piece about the anti-semitic aspect of the protests at Columbia…and by extension other campuses recently.
I was hesitant to accept that all of the protest of Israel was anti-semitism until McWhorter compared it to the protests in the 80s of South Africa. This is quite an oversimplification by me, but I found it quite persuasive that South African students did not feel unsafe or personally slighted by those protests, and Jewish and Israeli students to feel unsafe now. I buy that entirely. I recommend the piece. (I have a slight pull back because his definition of anti-semitism relies on how students feel…but the issue is slippery.). I’d put my agreement with him at around 95%…and I really dislike that man.
You two are much better men than McWhorter, in my view. I find it easier to agree with you. Easier still to be influenced by you. That said, here is my issue with structure.
I start out on shaky ground because it appears that I support the protests. To be clear, I do not. But, the protests are…or maybe I should say, opposition to the war is about the manner the war is being conducted more than Israel’s right to defend itself. And even if it is not, there is no good way to sell war. The responsibility is to eliminate as many crimes against humanity as possible in the way the war…any war…is prosecuted. Who lived where…and when…is almost entirely irrelevant. Those facts, stories, legends…whatever, are quite meaningful on a personal level, but the deciding factor will be power of some sort. Israel has that power, and its allies have that power to determine what is. Beyond that, the powerful will need to make some pretense toward justice. That isn’t a slight on my part. War is about leveraging power. That will be done while selling justice to a world audience.
Israel is a nuclear power. Israel’s allies are the most powerful. Israel’s job now is to do what is necessary to defend itself and protect its future, and sell it all to a world currently vibing on a strong anti-semitism virus. There is no question that anti-semitism colors this conflict, but those with it won’t be persuaded away from it. Israel will have to play the long game here. All objections to it for whatever unjust reason is here permanently among those who currently think so. The persuasion to be made is with history, and that will be done by being as just as possible in how the war is prosecuted.
04/25/2024 @ 12:17 am
Criticism of Israel is not intrinsically antisemitic. That’s never been the issue. If you were to ask me about Israeli policies on the West Bank, I would agree with a lot of protestors.
The fundamental nature of the protests isn’t about the legitimate stuff. It has a huge demonizing Jews component. We saw that on October 8 with the Harvard Student Organizations announcement.
I have noted on another site that I can’t get to a legitimate critique of Israel when I’m so busy answering the lies.
As to the PR aspect, Israel is notoriously bad at that. Their mentality doesn’t relate to that.
04/26/2024 @ 3:12 pm
Wonderful. Thank you! And a Gitten Shabbes – because, why not? It’s a palace in time (Heschel).