What a surreal world.
As I read this week’s Torah portion, which - more than 3300 years ago - gives the Jews legal parameters for Jewish ancestral lands in Israel, my first thought was “You see! Jews have been in Israel for thousands of years!”
That's sad. The truth is patently obvious, despite surreal efforts to claim otherwise.
Like the 2012 report from Iran’s Ahlul Beyt News Agency: “Chairman of the Supreme Islamic Council in Jerusalem, Dr. Ekrima Sabr, has declared that after twenty-five years of digging, archaeologists are unanimous that not a single stone has been found related to Jerusalem’s alleged Jewish history.” Huh???
Or Yasser Arafat angering President Bill Clinton by claiming there was never a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. How was he not laughed off the world stage?
Do we really need to cite historic Muslim texts - written before the radicalism of the past 75 years - which plainly state the commonly-known fact that Jews are indigenous to Israel and that Israel has always been our spiritual center (even as colonialist invasions, which often banished Jews, didn’t always allow it to be our geographical home)?
Syrian-American Professor Philip Hitti (Princeton), when he testified before the Anglo-American Committee exploring Jewish immigration to Palestine after World War II, reportedly stated, “there is no such thing as a country of 'Palestine' in history.” Professor Hitti, who was adamantly against European-Jewish migration to Israel, saw Israel as southern Syria which was commonly accepted at the time.
For many centuries, there was an independent country called Judea/Israel. When the Romans conquered it and turned it into a territory of the Empire, they named the area ‘Palestina’, referring to the Philistines, who were already an extinct people. The Philistines weren’t indigenous to the land (they seem to have hailed from Greece or Crete), but they created communities on Israel’s coastal plain and became an implacable foe of the Jews. Hence, the Romans delighted in labelling the area Palestina as a slap to the conquered Jews.
Palestina was just a way of calling the area 'vanquished Judea'.
Once the Muslim Ottoman Empire colonized the area, Jews in Israel lived relatively peacefully under their domination. And when European Jews started migrating in greater numbers (towards the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th), many Muslims welcomed the advantages. Emir Feisal, who represented the Arab world at the Paris Peace Conference (1919), is reported to have said “We Arabs…wish the Jews a hearty welcome home…” Muslim families and brokers sold hundreds of thousands of acres to immigrating Jews in those years. It was a win-win.
Then the Muslim Brotherhood got involved, demonized the immigrants, and eventually turned truth on its head.
Let's speak truth: It’s been Jewish land for millennia. Jews in Israel are an indigenous people, colonized and abused for many centuries, yet willing to live in peace with people of all nationalities and faiths.
With that as an indisputable premise, and when Muslim leadership openly and honestly eradicates Jew-hatred from its educational system, let’s sit down and figure out how to peacefully coexist.
Rabbi Mendy Herson's Blog
Stating The Obvious
The Dangerous Game Of Plausible Deniability
Imagine a person who maliciously gives someone bad advice. Sounds nasty,but can you prove anything? He can claim he just had a mistaken perspective! Because you can’t prove motive, this guy has ‘plausible deniability.’ He can claim innocence, and people may believe him. He may even believe himself.
When the Torah forbids “placing a stumbling block before the blind (i.e. misguiding someone)”, it adds “and fear your G-d.” Remember that G-d knows your thoughts and motives, even if no one else does. You’re not going to escape responsibility.
Humans are fallible, so humanly-generated social constructs will be somewhat flawed. Communism - who’s Manifesto frames all of history as a struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed - was introduced as an antidote to the flaws of Imperialism. Communist advocacy for the downtrodden became very popular, especially among the young and idealistic.
Then Communism showed its brutal flaws. Stalin alone is estimated to have killed over 7 million people. I lived in the USSR for almost six months in 1989-1990, and was heartbroken for the hundreds of millions of poor souls trapped in that socialist misery.
The socialists had quickly become fascists, even as they vigorously clung to the implausible facade that they were actually protecting the vulnerable. They knew that - to some - ‘protecting the underdog’ is the shield of all shields, and can even turn an empirically false position into ‘plausible deniability.’
How can anyone, unless they were indoctrinated with Jew-hatred from birth, see Hamas in a positive light after October 7? How can otherwise intelligent American students wave the flags of genocidal rapists? It seems that Stalin's heirs, Marxist adults still pursuing the destruction of Western and Jewish civilization, are cynically puppeteering this vicious University campaign of [im]plausible deniability.
It all begins with maneuvering and distorting facts so that Israel is seen as the oppressor and Palestinians as the oppressed.
Years ago, I had a conversation with the president of a major university, during which he noted his responsibility to protect Muslim students from Islamophobia. I vigorously agreed. Then, after a moment’s silence, I added, “I hope you also work to protect Jewish students from anti-semitisim.” I was alarmed when he responded: “The Jewish students are well organized and can take care of themselves.”
Had Jews - persecuted for millennia and 0.2% of the globe’s population - morphed from a vulnerable minority to privileged members of the establishment? Did 16 million Jews with a single Jewish country have the upper hand over 2 billion Muslims in 49 Muslim countries (seven of which are obscenely wealthy)? Dystopia.
Yet, deeply-bigoted forces - too many of them University professors - are identifying Israel, and Jews, as the ‘Imperialist’ enemy of the vulnerable. They’re weaving radical Islam, a fascist, brutality theology, into the tapestry of the oppressed. Dystopia.
Some naive students are buying it. And some university administrators are apparently afraid to declare that this emperor has no clothes.
So Jew-hatred, proudly displayed, continues in the Quad. And in city streets.
We’re living in dystopian, precarious times. Declare the implausibility. Make yourself heard.