Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — What, exactly do American Jews think about the possibility of reuniting small parts of Judea and Samaria with the rest of Israel? Rabbi Eric Yoffie, former president of the Union for Reform Judaism, says he knows. Writing in Haaretz this week, he declared: “American Jews are not happy.” Note he didn’t say “some” or even “many.” Rather, “American Jews” — all of them, apparently — are “not happy” about any possible annexation. According to Yoffie, all American Jews are “shocked,” “panicked,” “puzzled,” “confused,” and “above a...
(JNS) — A young Israeli soldier, Amit Ben-Yigal, was stoned to death last week by Palestinian Arab terrorists. The response of the American Jewish left was appalling. However, the response of the rest of the Jewish community wasn’t much better. Every Arab terrorist murder of a Jew is an outrage. But a death by stoning has unique implications that should merit additional comment and introspection by Jews around the world. Most Jews who are murdered by Arab terrorists are killed by gunshots or — as in the case of my daughter, Alisa — by bombs....
(JNS)—“Annexation Would Hurt Israel” declared the headline of a May 8 op-ed in The New York Times by Mideast scholar Daniel Pipes. According to Pipes, the incorporation of any part of the Judea-Samaria territories into the State of Israel is a bad idea because it will anger a lot of people. But the historical record shows that such fears are not well founded. U.S. President Donald Trump will “erupt in fury,” writes Pipes. Democrats will be “alienated” from Israel. “Major European states” will be outraged. The hope for improving relatio...
(JNS)—They almost had me believing. The Saudis, that is. Last week, they almost had me believing that they are truly becoming moderate and really do accept Israel’s existence. Then the mask came off, and my hopes all came crashing down. What got my hopes up, all too briefly, was the controversy over a new series on Saudi television concerning relations between Jews and Arabs in the Persian Gulf in 1948. Since Saudi Arabian society is completely controlled by its authoritarian government, it was big news that some Arabs were denouncing the TV...
(JNS)—The whole world is changing—but not for J Street, which, virus or no virus, is still devoting itself to persuading members of U.S. Congress to embrace the Palestinian cause. Over the past several weeks, J Street was mobilizing its supporters around the country to urge them to “demand the administration release vital assistance to help the Palestinians combat the coronavirus pandemic.” Think about that. In the midst of an epidemic that has left U.S. hospitals desperately short of emergency equipment and has resulted in millions of America...
(JNS)—A Palestinian activist’s harsh response to the first Israeli fatality from the coronavirus has sparked some controversy. It’s a tempest in a teapot, but it also contains an important lesson or two. The activist, Ms. Leen Dweik, was president of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at New York University in 2018-19. In response to the news that 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Arye Even died from the virus in Israel, Dweik tweeted a contemptuous message referencing the painting of her fingernails. Her sneering comment was so ugly...
(JNS)—Did you hear the shocking news? Sixty Congress members just signed a letter demanding that the federal government stop dismantling illegally built homes belonging to whites, though they didn’t object to the dismantling of illegal homes built by African-Americans. Oops, wait! Sorry, I got that mixed up. The 60 Congress members demanded that the Israeli government stop dismantling any illegally built homes that have been built by Arabs. But they did not object to Israel’s continuing policy of dismantling of illegally built Jewish homes...
(JNS)—The problem of anti-Semitic intimidation on American college campuses is serious, and hopefully, U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order will help combat it. But an equally significant problem is the deeply entrenched anti-Israel bias in the lectures, discussions and even the student trips abroad that our sons and daughters are participating in at many universities today. Case in point: an upcoming trip to “Israel and Palestine” for students who attend American University in our nation’s capital. The official descripti...
(JNS)—Amid all the hubbub over the latest wave of Palestinian Arab rocket attacks against Israel, one extremely important part of the story passed almost unnoticed. I call it Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’s dirty little secret. A news brief carried by one of the wire services reported that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine announced that it has “expanded its rockets’ range beyond Gaza border communities.” The significance of the news, as presented by the media, was that a terrorist faction was boasting of new ro...
(JNS)—The decision by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to serve as one of the featured speakers at the upcoming J Street conference should trouble every supporter of Israel. It’s both a boost for the Jewish critics of Israel and a disturbing sign of trends within the Democratic Party. It was 10 years ago this week, in October 2009, that the New York senator announced that he would not be speaking at that year’s J Street conference in Washington, D.C., following reports that he had initially accepted its invitation to speak. J Str...
(JNS)—What would a Jewish holiday be, without an op-ed in The New York Times demanding that Israel make more concessions to the Palestinian Arabs? On Rosh Hashanah, the Times published “Shrinking the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” by the Israeli journalist Micah Goodman. In it, he called for five new concessions by Israel: “paving a network of roads connecting all the Palestinian autonomous areas”; turning over control of the roads to the Palestinian Authority; “eliminating Israeli checkpoints”; giving the P.A. “more land for development”; a...
(JNS)—Many parents of my age remember striving to be able to send their children to summer camp. Now, as grandparents, we see our own children doing the same. I believed then, as I do now, that summer camp is a time when children make new friendships—many of which last into their adult years—grow emotionally and learn what we call “people skills.” Somewhere in the boxes that accumulated over the years in our basement are videotapes of our five children at summer camp. We see our kids in various activities—playing baseball and basketball,...
(JNS)—For years, the pundits have been telling us that Israeli democracy is in danger because of the Arab birthrate, or because of the Jewish nation-state law, or because of the debates over the powers of Israel’s High Court. I wonder if they will recognize the danger posed by the 10 left-wing American Jewish organizations that have formed a new umbrella organization, the essential purpose of which is to undermine Israeli democracy. Last week, J Street and nine other Jewish left-wing groups declared themselves part of the new “Pr...
(JNS)—New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker seems to think that America has been supporting the creation of a Palestinian state pretty much since time immemorial. He’s badly in need of a history lesson. Booker made his latest comments in an interview with David Axelrod on his podcast, “The Axe Files.” Axelrod was former President Barack Obama’s chief campaign strategist, and Palestinian statehood was a central plank in Obama’s ideology. So it’s no surprise that Axelrod would ask Booker a question slanted in favor of that goal. But Booker is well-educa...
(JNS)—Some liberal American Jewish organizations are urging U.S. President Donald Trump to oppose Israeli annexation of any part of Judea and Samaria. Some conservative Jewish organizations are urging the opposite. Good. It’s time we had a full debate in the American Jewish community about this issue. Serious dialogue and a meaningful conversation are long overdue. Unfortunately, the Anti-Defamation League has gotten the conversation off to a poor start by distorting and misrepresenting some of the key facts that need to be considered. In an...
(JNS)—In the space of 48 hours last week, four Jewish Democrats in Congress denounced Israel’s prime minister, two more Democrats wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post denouncing Israel’s prime minister, and 10 Jewish liberal groups issued a statement denouncing Israel’s prime minister. What a remarkable coincidence! The allegedly spontaneous three-pronged media assault began with Representatives Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), on the op-ed page of The Washington Post on April 10, absurdly accusing Israeli Prime M...
(JNS)—He has engaged in “crude anti-Semitism,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. He has “consistently impugned the loyalty of American Jews,” said the American Jewish Congress. And he has compared Israel to the Nazis, which according to the U.S. State Department, is anti-Semitic. Yet, irony of ironies, longtime Democratic Party official James Zogby has emerged as one of the most prominent voices in the party defending Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and denying that her remarks about Jews being disloyal were anti-Semitic. Zogby is a longtime...
(JNS)—Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) has a lot of “firsts” to her credit. She is the first Palestinian Arab elected to the U.S. Congress. She is one of the first two Muslim women to be elected to Congress. And now she is the first member of Congress to make a fraudulent claim about her own grandmother in order to score points against Israel. Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union with Jake Tapper” on March 17, Tlaib was asked about her claims that “racism” and “Islamophobia” were the real motives behind the widespread criticism of the recent anti-Sem...
(JNS)—Like most victims of Palestinian Arab terrorism, Avraham Bromberg would have been completely forgotten if not for the persistence of the murderer’s many admirers and financial sponsors. Bromberg was just 20 years old when he was murdered. The same age as my daughter, Alisa, when she was murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists in 1995. Avraham was hitchhiking. In those days, all young Israelis hitchhiked. Nobody thought of it as a potentially lethal activity. A car with Israeli license plates stopped to give him a ride. The driver and his...
(JNS)—The precise details of the forthcoming Trump administration Mideast peace plan are not yet known, but the basic principle was declared by senior adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner at last week’s Warsaw conference. “Both sides will have to make compromises,” he said. Kushner’s statement follows numerous similar statements by American officials, including the president himself. In his Feb. 9, 2017 interview with Israel Hayom, U.S. President Donald Trump said: “I think that both sides will have to make significant compromises...
(JNS)—More than three-fourths of American Jews want Israel to be reduced to just miles wide—narrower than Washington, D.C., or the Bronx. How can that be? The answer, of course, is that it can’t be. But J Street is now making that claim anyway, and some media outlets this week fell for it. J Street wants to see an independent Palestinian state established alongside the pre-1967 armistice lines, which means that Israel would be a mere nine miles wide. It would be very helpful to J Street’s efforts if it could claim that most Jews support...
(JNS)—The Palestinian Authority last week removed a photo from the website of one of its ministries because it showed a meeting of P.A. officials in which bottles of a popular Israeli juice were visible on the table. For friends of Israel, it was another in a long series of mildly amusing incidents in which P.A. officials have gone to absurd lengths to slight the Jewish state. It was all the more entertaining because it exposed the blatant hypocrisy of P.A. officials who call for boycotts of Israeli products while they are enjoying Israeli p...
(JNS)—The Australian government has decided that Israel’s capital should be torn in half, resuming the apartheid-like status that prevailed the last time the Arabs occupied part of Jerusalem. Would the Temple Mount be in Israel’s part of Jerusalem? Nope. Judaism’s holiest site is “Palestinian,” according to the Australians. What about the Western Wall? Not that, either. It’s “occupied territory.” How about the Old City’s Jewish Quarter, where Jews have lived since time immemorial? Off-limits to Jews. The Mount of Olives, the world’s oldest...
(JNS)—New York Times op-ed columnist Michelle Goldberg has stirred quite a hornet’s nest with her recent article declaring that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitic. Others will wrestle with the anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism debate. I prefer to focus on one particular sentence that really goes to the heart of the issue—and which also reveals Goldberg’s gross ignorance of the basic history of the issue she is addressing. According to Goldberg, Palestinian demands are reasonable, and it’s Israel that is being unfair because “the de facto policy of t...
(JNS)—Some American pundits are slamming Israel for denying entry to Palestinian-American student Lara Alqasem. Perhaps they should take a look at America’s own laws concerning the admission of extremists before they throw mud at Israel. In 2014, Ms. Alqasem became a member of the anti-Israel group Students for Justice in Palestine at her home campus, the University of Florida. She didn’t join as some passing lark; she was an activist who rose through the ranks, becoming vice president of the chapter, and then serving as president in 2016-...
