Following Mike Pompeo’s declaration that Jews living in
Judea & Samaria are not illegal, I read that Rabbi Rick Jacobs, who heads
the American Reform Movement, disagrees with the US Secretary of State.
Inadvertently, Rabbi Jacobs is pushing the notion that it is
fine for Muslims to live anywhere they like in the West Bank, but it is illegal
for Jews to live in Judea & Samaria because this gets in the way of his
vision for peace.
This notion is inherently anti-Semitic. It rejects the
essence of Judaism and its connection to the land.
Irrespective of how this strange dichotomy between Rabbi
Jacobs and the Secretary of State arose, I would like to urge Rabbi Jacobs to
find his way back to reality and truth, and to bring his congregation with him,
for they have all surely lost their way and wandered mistakenly into dark
places where Jews have no place to tread.
A year ago, in an interview with The Times of Israel, Rabbi
Jacobs said he intended for Reform Jewry to “double down” on Israel. How
did he intend to do that exactly?
Rabbi Jacobs still promotes a two-state solution without
being aware that this two-state solution is dead. It died years ago. It was
killed by the Palestinians.
The Reform Movement protests the idea that Israel can annex strategically
important territory that has always been Israeli and Jewish, like the Jordan
Valley or parts of Judea & Samaria.
Years ago, Israelis were ready to give peace with the
Palestinians a chance. Not anymore. Then, Israelis were like Rabbi Jacobs, naïve
peace-makers, tired of war. Today, Israelis are realists. We experienced the
evident truth of what the Palestinians are all about. And it is not peace. It
is death. Dead Jews. Death to Israel.
Yet, people like Rabbi Jacobs are still trying to drag this
dead two-state camel through burning Palestinian sand toward a distant oasis, an
oasis called “peace.” What they fail to realize, through their fevered
brow, addled by the heat of a region in constant conflict, that it is not an
oasis but a fata morgana, a mirage of their own imagination. An image once
shared by Israelis, but never by an obsessively anti-Semitic and rejectionist
Palestinian leadership.
Those who do not strengthen Israel but wish to carve up the
Jewish State at such a tremulous time, to reduce it to a rump and vulnerable
state against an implacable enemy are not supporting Israel. Rabbi Jacobs cut his connection to Keren
Kayemet-The Jewish National Fund for buying land in Judea & Samaria.
I do not see young pro-Israel Reform activists joining with
our affirmative Zionist students in facing down the Israel haters on campus.
I would relate to them, and to Rabbi Jacobs, the words of
Menachem Begin when threatened by Joe Biden to surrender to Palestinian demands
about building settlements, “I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a
proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. We will stand by our
principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them
again, with or without your aid.”
Zionism, Rabbi Jacobs, is a noble endeavor. It is moral and
just. We do not steal land from anyone. We will not let others steal our land
from us.
When Rabbi Jacobs called for strengthening the ties between
his Reform Movement and Israel he meant strengthening the influence of the
Reform Movement in Israel which is fine if that doesn’t mean weakening the
affirmative Zionism that Israel needs more than ever today.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs continues to blame Israeli Jews for the
ills of a vengeful Palestinian society.
To Rabbi Jacobs, it is the Jew living in Ariel that is
causing Palestinians to go hunting for vulnerable Jews to kill. For him, it is
the Jew in Efrat that causes the imams, the Palestinian teachers, the political
inciters, to inflame their people into killing Jews and to destroy the “Zionist
entity.”
If only the Jew will pack up and leave, says Rabbi Jacobs,
we will have peace. He is wrong.
Which leads me to ask. What Judaism is Rabbi Jacobs selling?
Is there anything in his brand of Judaism that feels a connection to the
biblical call to honor and defend the land?
How much more shall we give, rabbi? To 1967 lines, where Hamas terrorists will be
looking down on Ben Gurion Airport and Tel Aviv, lying in the lowland below
their feet? To seventy yards from the main north-south arterial highway that
borders Tulkarm, where Hamas suicide bombers came to blow us up in Netanya at
Pesach as we prayed in the Park Hotel, as we bought our groceries in our local
shuk, as my wife went to meet a friend in the main shopping mall where a two
suicide bombers were waiting?
How much more land, rabbi? How much more before you realize
you were wrong with your two-state fantasy, a fantasy that leaves us dead?
Did you applaud when Arik Sharon pulled nine thousand Jews
out of the Gaza Strip? Are you happy now that Hamas and Islamic Jihad are
stockpiling more deadly rockets and missiles?
On which land, rabbi, will you make your final stand?
I have a message of hope for Rabbi Jacobs. There are
solutions for peace, but they do not include your failed two-state
non-solution. Get over it, Rabbi. Sit your week of Shiva for something that
will never be, and join us in creating a better future for Jews and Arabs in
the Middle East.
Simply put, peaceniks like Rabbi Jacobs have to realize they
have become fixated on a solution that neither camp of the Palestinian
political divide have any intention of achieving. How many more warning signs
have to be waved in front of their non-seeing eyes before they get real.
The Palestinians have no intention, ever, of living in peace
alongside the Jewish State of Israel.
Not the corrupt kleptocracy of the Fatah-led Palestinian
Authority in Ramallah. Not Hamas in the Gaza Strip, that is poised to usurp
power in the West Bank as soon as Israel takes its hand off the security
arrangements. Not Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an Iranian proxy that successfully
launched over 400 rockets into Israeli civilian centers recently.
We all want peace, rabbi, but we will not get it by surrendering
to the demands of our enemy and incrementally giving them more and more of our
G-d-given land.
Think rabbi. Think! Maybe you can join us in planning a
better future for Jew and Arab. One that begins by realizing that, to achieve it,
we have to knock the props out of a dysfunctional Palestinian leadership. That
we first need to dismantle the Palestinian political infrastructure that has
become a violent monster, not a peace-partner.
Peace was only achieved to end World War Two by totally
destroying Germany and Japan. Total victory was necessary in order to kill the
obsessional enemy ideology by both warring regimes. It will only be by total
victory that this perpetual stand-off that has caused fifty years of
hopelessness and the continuation of the obsessional anti-Semitic ideology of
our twin-headed Palestinian political-terror enemy will be defeated. It needs
to be totally dismantled and replaced by technocrats, businessmen and leaders
who really do want to deliver peace and prosperity.
First the rotten infrastructure that has caused so much
grief, injury and death needs to be removed completely. It may take a
generation but, without it, a better future cannot take root.
Even the anticipated Trump economic plan will not work
without this painful, but essential, first step, rabbi.
Would you give a state in Syria to the surviving ISIS
terrorists? I don’t think so. If the Palestinians end up with less than a state,
so be it. They lost that right to a fully-fledged state, if ever they had it, following
their fifty-year terror campaign. Why would we trust them now?
Maybe they should start thinking of an Arab confederacy. It
worked for the United Arab Emirates.
Ideas, rabbi. Fresh ideas. New ideas. Think out of the box,
because your old ideas are dead.
Those who forgot the errors of the past, or who are not
aware of them, are carrying these errors on their backs today. They are the
international diplomatic world, impotent to reform their ideas. Stuck in a
fifty-year-old mantra that is not working.
They are the professional radical anti-Semites and Israel
haters who are convincing their masters to ignore Palestinian crimes and abuses
and solely punish Israel.
They are well-meaning, but sadly mistaken, people like Rabbi
Jacobs, J-Street, Jewish Voices for Palestine, who got lost in the hate-filled woods
and who need to find their GPS and return to their Jewish roots.
They may not be aware of it, though many do, but, basically,
they are pushing a world without Israel.
They are dooming us to repeat those errors. And, with them,
we will never achieve peace.
Barry Shaw is an affirmative and unapologetic Zionist. He
is also the International Public Diplomacy Director at the Israel Institute for
Strategic Studies. He is also the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS and
Anti-Semitism.’