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Jewish World Review Nov. 20, 2009 / 3 Kislev 5770 Whither American Jewry? By Caroline B. Glick
Given that this is the case, it is unsurprising that until this week, Kadima
leader Tzipi Livni tried to blame Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for US
President Barack Obama's hostility towards Israel. Far more newsworthy than
her criticism of Netanyahu was her public rebuke of Obama this week for his
attempt to strong-arm Israel into barring Jewish construction in Jerusalem's
Gilo neighborhood.
Wednesday Livni said, "Gilo is part of the Israeli consensus...and it is
important to understand this for all discussions of borders in any future
agreement."
Indeed. There is an Israeli consensus. The Israeli consensus regarding
Jerusalem is based among other things on the understanding that no nation
can give up its capital city and survive.
Livni wants to be Israel's Prime Minister one day. For that to happen,
Israel must survive until she wins an election. And Israel will not long
survive if it surrenders its right to its capital.
One might have thought that American Jews could be counted on to stand by
Israel on this issue. But then, one would be wrong.
For the past six years, Republican Senator Sam Brownback has repeatedly
submitted a bill to the US Senate that, if passed into law would revoke the
Presidential waiver that has allowed successive Presidents to refuse to
implement the 1995 law requiring the State Department to move US Embassy to
Jerusalem. This year Brownback co-sponsored his bill with Independent
Senator Joseph Lieberman. As luck would have it, the Brownback-Lieberman
bill was submitted two weeks before Obama launched his latest campaign
against Jewish building in Jerusalem.
In the 1980s and 1990s, American Jews lobbied hard to get the US Embassy
moved to Jerusalem. But now some American Jewish leaders recoil at the very
notion. In response the Brownback-Lieberman Jerusalem Embassy Relocation Act
of 2009, the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle published an editorial last
Friday entitled, "Bad move, Senator Brownback." The newspaper's editors
condemned their retiring senator and called his bill, "a cheap,
grand-standing move by a conservative Republican on his way out the door,
playing to Jews and Christian Zionists while trying to throw a monkey wrench
into President Obama's diplomatic spokes."
According to Sen. Brownback's office, the paper never had any criticism of
the same bill when he submitted it during former president George W. Bush's
tenure in office. But now, as Israel's government and opposition stand
shoulder to shoulder protecting Israeli control over Jerusalem from assaults
by Obama, Kansas City's Jewish newspaper's editorial board willingly bucked
what it acknowledged are the wishes of "Jews and Christian Zionists," in
order to stand by their man in the Oval Office.
Some of Israel's most high-profile supporters in the US are conservative
talk radio and television hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity
and Glenn Beck. But rather than thank them for their support, the
Anti-Defamation League, which is supposed to be dedicated first and foremost
to defending Jews from anti-Semitism, published a special report this week
where it insinuated that they cultivate a climate of hatred and paranoia
which could endanger Jews among others.
The ADL report, "Rage Grows in America: Anti-Government Conspiracies,"
dubbed Beck the "fearmonger-in-chief," for his opposition to Obama's
domestic and foreign policies. It similarly castigated the so-called
"tea-party" movement which has attracted millions of Americans opposed to
high taxes, and the townhall meetings this past summer where millions of
Americans peacefully argued against Obama's healthcare policies.
The ADL's decision to issue a special report attacking Obama's political
opponents and insinuating that Americans who oppose him cultivate an
environment in which paranoid and dangerous fringe groups feel comfortable
operating is strange given that the ADL never put out a similar report
against parallel anti-Bush movements. As Commentary's Jonathan Tobin noted
this week, the ADL was more likely to see overt and vicious anti-Semitic
statements and placards being waved around at anti-Iraq war rallies than at
anti-Obama healthcare and tax policy demonstrations.
Ironically, the ADL has a specific institutional interest in combating
leftist paranoia. A recent movie attacking the ADL called Defamation, by
leftist, anti-Israel Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir is currently hitting the
film festival circuit in the US and Europe. A major hit among anti-Israel
activists and regular anti-Semites on the Left and Right,
Defamation accuses the ADL of exaggerating the Holocaust and
anti-Semitism to justify
what Shamir views as its nefarious aims. Apparently, tribal loyalty to the
Left trumps the institutional interests of the ADL.
It certainly trumps the interests of New York University's Hillel Director
Rabbi Yehuda Sarna. As James Taranto reported Wednesday in the Wall Street
Journal , this week Sarna called for NYU's Jewish community to join NYU
Muslims at a rally that both commemorated the massacre at Ft. Hood and
denounced NYU Professor Tunku Varadarajan for writing a column in
Forbes magazine.
In his article, Varadarajan committed the crime of stating the obvious fact
that Ft. Hood terrorist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was motivated by his Islamic
beliefs when he shouted Allahu Akbar and shot some forty people, killing 13.
Given that people and groups like al Qaida and Hamas that share Hasan's
views assert that all Jews should be killed, it would seem that the good
rabbi would not feel the need to attack professors who point out that
Hasan's views are dangerous. But then, it is no longer strange to see
Hillels on American university campuses behaving in a manner that is not in
line with what might be considered the interests of either the American
Jewish community or the Jewish people as a whole.
Take UC Berkeley's Hillel center for example. Since Ken Kramarz, Hillel's
current regional director for Northern California started his job in June
2007, Berkeley's Hillel has adopted a hostile view towards Judaism and
Israel. As pro-Israel community activist Natan Nestel notes, in the past
year alone, Hillel held a dance party on Yom Hashoah, and it held a Cinco de
Mayo barbeque on Memorial Day for Fallen IDF Soldiers. It has also failed to
hold community seders for the past two years. Instead, last year, its
members hung signs in the Hillel building declaring, "Matza sucks."
Beyond its derogatory treatment of Jewish and Israeli holidays, Berkeley's
Hillel has allowed an extremist group called Students for Justice for
Palestine to participate in its organizational meetings. SJP calls for
Israel's destruction through unlimited Arab immigration. It also advocates
for UC Berkeley to divest from Israel. Edgar Bronfman, Hillel's
International Chairman has characterized SJP umbrella organization as
"anti-Israel…anti-Semitic [and] alarming…"
No doubt owing in part to Berkeley Hillel's decision to permit SJP members
to spread their propaganda at its organizational meetings, Hillel's student
leaders and members participated in SJP's Israel Apartheid Week this past
March.
The student meeting that SJP participated in at Berkeley's Hillel was
sponsored by a group called "Kesher Enoshi." This group describes itself as
"a progressive Jewish community that engages directly with Israeli civil
society. We do this by educating ourselves and others about the day-to-day
struggles of people in Israel by making direct connections with human rights
/ social change organizations in Israel, linking their struggles with those
on campus and in the wider community, and building a community of active
participants in social change in Israel."
This mission statement, which says nothing about Zionism, sounds an awful
lot like the goal of the New Israel Fund. This month, three Arab "civil
society" groups supported to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars by
the NIF published a poster depicting an IDF soldier touching the breast of
an Arab woman with the caption, "Her husband needs a permit to touch her,
the occupation penetrates her life every day."
The poster was issued to publicize a conference in Haifa called "My Land,
Space, Body and Sexuality: Palestinians in the Shadow of the Wall," whose
purpose was to demonize Israel using post-modern jargon.
Unlike Hillel, NIF is widely recognized as a far-left fringe group. But as
Arab Israeli NGO's use the dollars of American Jewish NIF donors to advance
their "civil society" programs aimed at delegitimizing Israel's right to
exist, the Reform movement - which is not a fringe group -- decided
unanimously two weeks ago to criticize and pressure Israel for what its
leadership views as Israel's unfair treatment of its Arab citizens.
As this column goes to press, if its board members don't cancel their
meeting, the San Francisco Jewish Federation will be grudgingly voting on a
resolution that would prohibit it from sponsoring events that denigrate or
demonize Israel or support organizations that partner with organizations
that call for divestment, sanctions or boycotts against Israel. The
resolution follows the Jewish Federation of San Francisco's decision to
co-sponsor the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival last summer. That festival
featured Shamir's Defamation , and the egregiously anti-Israel film Rachel
, about the late pro-terror activist Rachel Corrie. The film festival was
also sponsored by the anti-Zionist Jewish Voices for Peace group, the
American Friends Service Committee which hosted a dinner for Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York last year, the Rachel Corrie
Foundation and other radical anti-Israel groups.
If the vote takes place, it will be a great victory for a small group of
local Jewish activists. These individual Jews have banded together because
they are deeply disturbed by the Federation's willingness to use community
funds to advance events whose basic message is that Israel should be
destroyed.
Kadima's interests as a political party place it at loggerheads with the
government on almost every issue. But its leaders this week were rational
enough to recognize that they must support Israel's sovereign rights in
Jerusalem despite the fact that doing so placed it on the government's side.
Their display of sanity is a clear indication that Israeli society today is
healthy and capable of meeting the challenges it faces.
It is clear that most American Jews believe that it is in their interests to
support the Democratic Party and the Left. But like the anti-establishment
Jewish activists in San Francisco, American Jews ought to realize that on
issues like Israel's survival and their own survival as Jews they ought to
stand by their interests even when they seem to clash with their leftist and
Democratic loyalties. And they ought to stand by their friends on these
issues, even when their friends are conservative Republicans.
It can only be hoped that the San Francisco pro-Israel upstarts' campaign
against the Federation was successful yesterday. Then too, if the American
Jewish community is to long survive, these San Francisco Jewish activists'
demand that their community support Israel's right to exist must be joined
by their fellow American Jews throughout the country.
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JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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