jacobsvoice

[jacobsvoice]

Thomas Friedman’s Fury

(March 17, 2023 / JNS) Nothing riles New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman more than an Israeli government with the audacity to disregard his opinions and demands. His laceration of the Jewish state stretches as far back as his undergraduate years at Brandeis University. There, he was a member of Breira, a left-wing Jewish advocacy group that favored a two-state solution along the pre-1967 lines, thereby removing biblical Judea and Samaria (previously Jordan’s “West Bank”) from Israeli control. Friedman has been an unrelenting critic of Israel ever since.

In a March 8 diatribe, Friedman fancifully warned that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pursuing a “judicial putsch to crush the independence” of Israel’s judiciary. He urged American Jews “to choose sides on Israel,” but not any side—only Friedman’s.

“Every rabbi and every Jewish leader in America,” he wrote, must speak out to affirm his fury. Friedman’s preferred Jewish leader seems to be Los Angeles Rabbi Sharon Brous, who recently delivered a sermon titled “The Tears of Zion,” urging her congregation to challenge Netanyahu’s “illiberal, ultranationalist regime.” Only Netanyahu, it seems, is worthy of rabbinical laceration.

Given Friedman’s rants, Brous’s was mild criticism. In what he no doubt viewed as his nastiest insult, Friedman not only blamed Netanyahu for embracing “more and more ultranationalist and ultrareligious parties,” but also claimed that the prime minister “has come to embrace the Trumpist playbook,” whatever that means.

Friedman ignores the fact that, for Israel, former President Donald Trump was the most supportive American president since Harry Truman recognized the fledgling Jewish state back in 1948. Trump acknowledged Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and relocated the American embassy to Jerusalem in 2017, affirming it as Israel’s capital. Would that Friedman’s preferred presidents, whoever they may be, had done as much for Israel.

In Friedman’s indictment, Netanyahu is guilty of “radicalizing his base, attacking Israel’s legal, media and academic institutions” and “inciting his loyalists against centrist and left-wing Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs.”

Nor was that all. Netanyahu’s governments, wrote Friedman, have “sought every way possible to avoid the peace process with the Palestinians.” As it happens, it is the Palestinians who have rejected every opportunity for negotiations with Israel, as well as every Israeli offer of statehood and peace.

Friedman is also enraged that Netanyahu’s (unidentified) “team” has also “dismissed liberal American Jews” (like Friedman), choosing instead “to focus their energies on building support for Israel with Republicans and their evangelical base.” To Friedman, this is a shanda—a disgrace. He appears unaware of the fact that Israeli prime ministers are not obligated to take his advice.

“Alas,” Friedman laments, “most American Jewish organizations and lay leaders”—with the exception of “the powerful right-leaning Jewish lobbying organization” AIPAC—“are not built for this kind of existential fight inside Israel.” Instead, they do “whatever Netanyahu tells them.” Friedman prefers the opinion of a trio of Israeli writers who warned in The Times of Israel of “a political leadership that is undermining our society’s cohesion and its democratic ethos.”

To be sure, Friedman has hardly been the only Times journalist to lacerate Israel. Ever since the birth of Jewish statehood, a bevy of Jerusalem bureau chiefs and columnists—many of whom, like him, were Jewish—have joined the chorus of criticism. Indeed, at times it seemed as if that was an actual job requirement.

Friedman is currently ideologically partnered with current Times Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley, who seems incapable of writing an article without reference to Israeli “occupied” territory—that is, biblical Judea and Samaria. Times Jerusalem reporter Isabel Kershner has also adopted this misnomer.

None of them have attempted to explain why Benjamin Netanyahu, their favorite Israeli villain, is the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history. Perhaps it is they, not Netanyahu, who deserve reproach for their unremitting hostility.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of 12 books, including “Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism” and “Israel 1896-2016,” selected for Mosaic by Ruth Wisse and Martin Kramer as a Best Book for 2019.

[jacobsvoice]

A Bumbling Ambassador in Israel

In a striking display of arrogance – and ignorance – American Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides recently told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu what he must do, and not do, to resolve the current political crisis over judicial reform. Furthermore, Netanyahu must accept American policy recommendations regarding other aspects of Israeli governance.

Although Nides insisted that the United States would not dictate changes he made it clear that the Biden Administration prefers the Israeli government to become its deferential clone. Of primary importance is the High Court of Justice (Israel’s Supreme Court). Netanyahu’s intention to restrict its power infuriated Nides. “We’re telling the prime minister – as I tell my kids – ‘pump the brakes, slow down, try to get a consensus, bring the parties together.’” To Nides, Netanyahu is merely another “kid,”  to be told what must be done to satisfy American wishes.

Then there is the issue of Israeli settlements in Biblical Judea and Samaria - a source of “frustration” for the Biden administration. Nides, oblivious to their place in Jewish history, cannot restrain himself from bloviating about the evils of these Jewish communities, “a vexing issue for our country.” There is no indication that he has ever visited a settlement.

Another irritating issue for Nides concerns the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the most ancient Jewish holy site after the Machpelah burial site in Hebron of the Biblical patriarchs and matriarchs. He condemned the recent visit of Ben Gvir, Minister of National Security, to the Mount. This, for Nides, was “unacceptable.” It was nothing but a “provocative” act, “the kind of nonsense that lights things on fire.” But it was Nides who seemed to be burning with fury.

Nides proudly claims spending “60% of my time trying to help the Palestinian people” – revealing that his role as Ambassador to Israel is undeserving of his attention. He proudly cites the Biden administration’s commitment to increasing financial aid to UNRWA, the United Nations organization charged with helping Palestinian refugees of the 1947-48 Arab war that was fought to annihilate the fledgling Jewish state. By now, however, UNRWA has become a scam. Nides is oblivious to the reality that there are as many UNRWA employees (approximately 30,000) as there are genuine Palestinian refugees still living.

Given Nides’ evident determination to inject himself into Israeli policy decisions it is hardly surprising that he would be sharply rebuked by Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli. “I say to the American ambassador,” Chikli advised, “slam the breaks on yourself and mind your own business.” It is unlikely that Nides will comply with Chikli’s recommendation.

Nides’ background helped to frame his current stance on Israel. After working for liberal American politicians Walter Mondale and Joe Lieberman among others, he became Managing  Director of Morgan Stanley. From there he went to Credit Suisse before becoming Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources in the Obama administration. His talents in the financial world were evident. But Wall Street profits do not translate into expertise about the Middle East, least of all about Israel.

Diplomacy, especially with regard to Israel, is a different chapter in the Nides story. He realizes that the United States and Israel are bound together by “a sense of democracy and a sense of  democratic institutions.” That sounds reassuring – until he says that “when we believe that those democratic institutions are under stress and strain, we’re articulating [our concern]. That’s what we are doing now.” He seems to believe that the Biden administration is the appropriate judge of Israel’s behavior.

Nides may have been successful in business. But he has yet to comprehend that Israelis are determined to define and defend their ancient homeland and modern nation – despite his discomfort and without his intrusion. As for Netanyahu’s plans and decisions, Nides should watch and listen before he indulges in more rants. He might even realize that he was appointed Ambassador to Israel, not its critic-in-chief.

Algemeiner (March 3, 2023)

[jacobsvoice]

Brothers at War, Again?

Jerold S. Auerbach

February 5, 2023 / JNS) The current political turmoil in Israel, which seems to intensify daily, is not new to Jewish history in the Promised Land. An Israeli friend reminded me of a previous example of “brothers at war” that erupted one month after the birth of the State of Israel in 1948.

The arrival of the Altalena, a ship dispatched from France by the right-wing Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, was filled with desperately needed weapons and munitions. On board were more than 900 fighters prepared to defend the newborn Jewish state with their lives if necessary.

But its arrival triggered a violent internecine conflict. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, claiming that the Altalena posed a menacing challenge to the legitimacy of the Israeli government—and to his authority—ordered the newborn IDF to destroy it.

The ensuing battle on the beaches of Kfar Vitkin and Tel Aviv brought Israel to the brink of civil war. Sixteen Irgun fighters and three IDF soldiers died during the fighting and the ship, with its desperately needed weapons, was destroyed. Ben-Gurion and his defenders insisted that force was justified to save the fragile new nation from self-destruction.

The Altalena tragedy was long ago and its memory has faded. But Israel now confronts an ominously deepening conflict between its newly elected right-wing government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his political opponents on the left. According to an Associated Press report, his right-wing governing coalition has “prompted an unprecedented uproar from Israeli society.”

And not only among Israelis. New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Patrick Kingsley described the newly elected government as riding “a wave of far-right agenda items that would weaken the judiciary, entrench Israeli control of the West Bank … and bifurcate the military chain of command to give some far-right ministers greater control over matters related to the occupation.” For the Times, the “occupation” invariably refers to the return of Jews to biblical Judea and Samaria following the Six-Day War.

Kingsley cited the “centerpiece” of Netanyahu’s program as “a detailed plan for a sweeping judicial overhaul that includes reducing the Supreme Court’s influence over parliament and strengthening the government’s role in the appointment of judges.” Netanyahu’s agenda “threatens Israel’s democratic institutions” and “sounds the death rattle for long-ailing hopes for a Palestinian state.”

There will also be “a more combative stance toward the Palestinians” by reducing funding to the Palestinian Authority. And Itamar Ben-Gvir, the new national security minister “has angered Palestinians and many Arab countries by touring a sensitive religious site,” referring to the Temple Mount. Its name, of course, refers to the location of the most sacred ancient Jewish—not Palestinian—holy site, but Kingsley is oblivious to history.

According to the AP, the Netanyahu government’s commitment to annex the West Bank would “add fuel to calls that Israel is an ‘apartheid’ state.” Indeed, Israel’s “most right-wing and religiously conservative administration ever,” supported by “settlers and ultra-Orthodox parties that have vowed to reshape Israeli society,” threatens Israel’s “liberal democracy.”

Isabel Kershner, a New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem, contributed her own dire analysis. Not only is the new minister of national security an “ultranationalist” who has expanded authority over the police. The new “hard-right” finance minister claims more authority over settlements in the “occupied” West Bank. And “ultra-Orthodox lawmakers” want more autonomy and funding for religious schools. Worse still, the new coalition wants to empower the Knesset to overrule Supreme Court rulings.

The looming question is whether Israelis on the left can tolerate a right-wing government unlike any that has preceded it. Or whether, in the name of “democracy,” their fury over a lost election will erupt in violent protest that could tear their country apart.

To locate it within a historical framework: Can the Israeli left reject Ben-Gurion’s appalling resort to violence against Jews and accept the result of a democratic election? Can it accept Netanyahu’s reminder, “to lose in elections is not the end of democracy, this is the essence of democracy”?

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of 12 books, including Brothers at War: Israel and the Tragedy of the Altalena (2011).

[jacobsvoice]

The New York Times “Occupation” Obsession

JNS (February 1, 2023)

The New York Times has long been obsessed with Israel’s “occupation” of Biblical Judea and Samaria, relentlessly identified as “occupied territory.” No Jerusalem Bureau Chief or columnist (not even Thomas Friedman) has been as fixated on the term as Patrick Kingsley, who became  Bureau Chief two years ago. Appropriately, the Times welcomed him as the reporter “covering Israel and the occupied territories.”

Kingsley has lived up to his assignment. In one of his early reports he referred to the Palestinian city of Ramallah as “the hub of the occupied West Bank.” Several paragraphs later he identified the Palestinian Authority as “the body that oversees parts of the occupied territories.” In an outpouring of occupation repetition he referred to Jewish settlements in “the occupied Palestinians territories” and Israel’s responsibility as an “occupying power” to preserve health within “occupied territory.” The Palestinian Authority, predictably, is responsible for overseeing “parts of the occupied territories.”

The recent eruption of Palestinian violence has provided Kingsley with renewed opportunity to fixate on his favorite word of castigation. In two January 29th articles he cited “Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank and the fragile situation “in Israel and the occupied territories.” He referred to the land captured by Israel in the Six-Day War (1967) that is “considered occupied territory by most of the world.” (How much of the world he consulted is left unsaid.) He identified the Palestinian Authority as “the body that administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.”

Lest Kingsley’s words were insufficient, they were echoed in an adjacent article by Times journalist Raja Abdulrahim, who twice referred to “the Israel-occupied West Bank.”

If accuracy matters to the Times, Kingsley and his colleagues desperately need a history lesson. Jewish history in the Promised Land, according to the Biblical narrative, began when Abraham purchased the cave of Machpelah in Hebron as the burial site for Sarah. Over time Abraham, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah were also entombed there. There were no Palestinians then. The Israeli “occupied” territory that Kingsley repetitively cites was identified, millennia ago, as Biblical Judea and Samaria.

Following their 7th century conquest, Moslems began to claim ancient Jewish holy sites as their own. The prophet Muhammad was said to have stopped in Hebron during his journey from Mecca to Jerusalem. The Temple Mount, location of the Second Temple (hence its name), became a Moslem holy site with construction of the Dome of the Rock to testify to its sanctity. Jews are prohibited from praying there.

No self-identified “Palestinians” appeared until the 19th century. Until then there were only Arabs in Palestine. A Palestinian national identity, following the lead of Zionism, did not begin to emerge until after World War I. Politically as religiously, Palestinians and Moslems have relied on Jewish history to define their own identity.

Patrick Kingsley seems oblivious to history – whether modern or ancient. By now, five hundred thousand Jews live in more than two hundred settlements located in Biblical Judea and Samaria. To refer to it as “occupied” land, as does Kingsley and his fellow Jerusalem reporter Isabel Kershner, is to display ignorance of Jewish history in the land of Israel – or blatant bias.

There is no more appropriate place for Jews to live than in their ancient homeland. That, after all, defines Zionism and justifies a Jewish state in their promised land. New York Times reporters and columnists who are preoccupied with Israeli “occupation” are unlikely to embrace this reality.

 Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of twelve books, including Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel 1896-2016, selected for Mosaic by Ruth Wisse and Martin Kramer as a Best Book for 2019

[jacobsvoice]

Thomas Friedman’s Fury

JNS (January 21, 2023)

Unrelenting laceration of Israel has long been the hallmark of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. It began when, as a Brandeis University student, he joined Breira, a left-wing group demanding that Israel relinquish Biblical Judea and Samaria, restored to the Jewish state during the Six-Day War, and recognize Palestinian national aspirations in that land.  

Years later, when he became  Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Friedman seldom missed an opportunity to criticize Israel. He labeled it an “occupying power” while dismissing Palestinian terrorist attacks as merely a “poke in the ribs.” He identified the violent intifada with the American struggle for civil rights. Returning to the United States as a Times columnist, he warned that without a two-state (Israel and Palestine) solution, Israel would “be stuck with an apartheid-like, democracy-sapping permanent occupation” – of its Biblical homeland.

Friedman’s decades of criticism of Israel laid the groundwork for his recent Times diatribe (January 18). He imagines that “a new Israel is emerging,” with “many ministers having the audacity to be hostile to American values” and “nearly all are hostile to the Democratic Party,” as though its embrace is a requirement for Israeli political leaders.    

Friedman urges President Biden to “wade right in” to prevent Netanyahu and his “extremist coalition from turning Israel into an illiberal bastion of zealotry.” It seems oddly intrusive (except to Friedman) that an American President (to say nothing of a Times columnist) should tell an Israeli Prime Minister how to lead his country.

But, Friedman laments, “the Israel Joe Biden knew is vanishing and a new Israel is emerging.” How so? “Many ministers” (none are identified) “are hostile to American values, and nearly all are hostile to the Democratic Party” – as if Israeli government officials must be bound to Thomas Friedman’s political preferences.

Friedman suggests that President Biden try hard -  while displaying “tough love” - to “nudge things onto a healthier path.” High among the “things” that Friedman cites is the determination of the Netanyahu government to “radically alter the situation in the West Bank” – Biblical Judea and Samaria - by “effectively annexing it.” Thomas Friedman may not like it, but the likelihood that Biden - or any American president – could persuade Israel to relinquish its Biblical homeland is nil.

Friedman becomes a speechwriter for Biden, who must lacerate Netanyahu for “riding roughshod over American interests and values” – as though Israel, or any country, is obliged to genuflect to the United States. First on Biden’s (or Friedman’s) list is whether Israel’s control of its Biblical homeland is “a matter of temporary occupation or of an emerging annexation.” The obvious answer eludes Friedman: Israel does not “occupy,” nor will it “annex,” its promised land.

There is also the issue of the Temple Mount, the ancient Jewish holy site in Jerusalem’s Old City. In Friedman’s rendering, Biden must warn Netanyahu that his “extremist ministers” may “change the status quo on the Temple Mount,” which prohibits Jewish prayer. That might “destabilize” Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and the Abraham Accords, which formalized diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab countries.

That Jews are the victims of discrimination on the Temple Mount, where the First and Second Temples once stood but they are prohibited from praying, is ignored by Friedman.

Friedman’s self-appointed role as Biden’s adviser is predictable. His laceration of the Jewish state has a long history. Israeli leaders are unlikely to pay attention to Friedman’s fantasies. But he can find comfort in The New York Times, where unease with the Jewish state and its leaders is deeply embedded. Back in November he wrote: “The Israel we know is gone.” Alas, the Friedman we know is still here. Decades of unrelenting criticism  suggest that he, not Netanyahu, may be the zealot.

[jacobsvoice]

Remembering Jacob

(January 17, 2023 / JNS) My grandfather Jacob came to visit when I was four years old. I was fascinated by him because he was my only relative with a beard. He sat quietly and I hesitated to speak to him. I never saw him again.

When I pestered my father, Jacob’s son, about why he had not returned, I was told that he had died 13 years before I was born. But I vividly remembered his visit, so that was hard to believe.

My father showed me his only photograph of Jacob. Dressed in a suit with his jacket buttoned and a pocket handkerchief visible, he is seated on a chair in front of a stone wall. A wide mustache and long beard covered much of his face. A dark fedora hat rested on one knee. It was some consolation that our first names both began with the letter “J.” That, I eventually realized, was meant to bind us together and preserve his memory.

I learned that, as a wave of antisemitism loomed near Kishinev in the 1880s, Jacob’s father Mendel relocated his family to Botosani, the second-largest Jewish community in Moldavia. But Jewish life was no less precarious there. Near the end of the century, synagogues were desecrated and violent rioting against Jews increased. One-third of Romanian Jews, Jacob among them, left their country behind. The United States was his destination.

It was not an easy transition. Prospering German-American Jews did not welcome Jews from eastern Europe. Jacob Schiff, a prominent philanthropist, suggested that other countries be their destination. Even the New York Romanian Committee criticized the arrival of “beggars” and urged a monthly quota of 200 immigrants.

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Leaving his wife and young child behind, Jacob, then 45 years old, arrived at Ellis Island, the major American immigration center. Newcomers were processed through a series of medical examinations for “contagious and loathsome” diseases. If health problems were discovered, compulsory return to Europe loomed.

After an overnight train ride from New York, Jacob arrived in Pittsburgh. He was met by Israel Cohen, a family member who guided him to the Hill District, a shabby neighborhood uphill from the railroad station and the center of Jewish life. Jacob’s first impression of Pittsburgh could not have been pleasing. Visitors described it as “dark, dismal and dirty” and “an unattractive, smokey city.”

Jacob soon began to work in Cohen’s stogy factory, where he earned three to seven dollars weekly for 65 hours of work. It must have been tedious. A photo showed a cramped and shabby room without windows. Two middle-aged bearded men wearing kippot are working at a cluttered table. An open carton filled with stogies was nearby.

Within a year, Jacob was able to bring his wife Minnie and their young daughter to Pittsburgh. One year later, she gave birth to a son named Menachem Moshe to honor the memory of his grandfather. His name was Americanized to M. Maurice, eventually abbreviated to Morry, the name by which my father would always be known.

Life was not easy for the Auerbach family. Jacob left the stogy business to work as a railroad watchman while Morry sold newspapers and shined shoes to help financially. He fondly remembered Jacob singing Romanian folk songs and their time together for high holiday services in the nearby, oldest Pittsburgh synagogue. Although the life of impoverished immigrants was not easy, American possibilities were preferable to Romanian realities. In 1907, there was a pogrom in Botosani where Jews were robbed and murdered.

Early in the evening of Jan. 22, 1923, as Jacob was driving a horse-drawn bakery wagon, it was struck broadside by a car. Flung to the street, he suffered a fractured skull and died that night. Jacob was buried in the Kasa Torah cemetery, where his gravestone—with a Star of David at the top—identifies him in large letters as “Father.” He was 58 years old.

A yahrzeit candle will commemorate one hundred years since Jacob’s tragic death. How I could remember a visit from the grandfather who died before I was born is a mystery. But that embedded yearning has enabled Jacob to remain with me. A solitary photograph may be all there is, but as I light the candle and watch it flicker, Jacob will surely return, if only in wistful memory.

My son Jeffrey, our third generation “J” and fellow historian, was my companion researcher for this article.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of twelve books, including Jacob’s Voices: Reflections of a Wandering American Jew.

[jacobsvoice]

Visiting the Temple Mount: Much Ado About Nothing

Jerold S. Auerbach

This past week, The New York Times ran an ominous sounding headline: “Hard-line Israeli Minister Visits Jerusalem Holy Site; Palestinians Seethe.”

What made them seethe? Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s new minister of national security in the Netanyahu government (identified as an “ultra-nationalist”), had the temerity to make “a provocative visit” to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s old city. As its name suggests it is the site of the ancient Jewish temples, millennia before Islam existed to challenge it. But Times correspondent Isabel Kershner reported that Palestinian leaders were provoked by the visit into “a furious reaction.” Why? Because Muslims claim the Mount as exclusively their own.

Ben-Gvir’s visit (at 7 a.m.) lasted less than fifteen minutes, time enough for him to condemn “racist discrimination” against Jews who are prohibited from praying on the Mount. But that was long enough for the Palestinian Foreign Minister to condemn it as “an unprecedented provocation” and a “flagrant assault.” Rather than dismiss this absurdity, Kershner cited Ben-Gvir’s visit as an example of ”the uncompromising approach to the Palestinians that has been promised by the new [Israeli] government.” Worse yet, it comes “at a time of growing violence in the occupied territories.”

Kershner did not identify (Palestinian) responsibility for the violence. Nor did she note that “occupied territories” are a favorite Times misnomer, to which she contributes, for Biblical Judea and Samaria. To her credit, however, she is aware that the Temple Mount is “the holiest site for Jews” – but only “the third holiest for Moslems.” Yet while Jews and non-Moslem tourists are permitted to visit, “they are not supposed to pray there.”

To understand why not it is necessary to return to the Six-Day War (1967), when the Israeli army reclaimed the Western Wall and Temple Mount – a joyous moment in Jewish history. But it quickly became a self-inflicted Jewish calamity. No sooner had Lt. General Mordechai Gur proudly proclaimed that “the Temple Mount is in our hands” than Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, meeting with Moslem leaders, agreed that while Jews could visit the Mount only Moslems could pray there. Astonishingly, Dayan had surrendered the holiest Jewish site: the Temple Mount had become the Mosque Mount

The Biden administration, predictably, has affirmed that capitulation. Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted that “disruption to the historic status quo at holy sites” could undermine the prospect of a two-state solution – which, he fails to notice, Palestinians have repeatedly rejected. Jordanian King Abdullah II warned of a conflict if Israel attempts to change the status of the Temple Mount. Other Arab states – Saudi

Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – have also condemned Ben-Gvir’s visit. Even the Israeli Supreme Court has capitulated, having ruled last year that the Temple Mount must remain a Mosque Mount, where Jews may visit but cannot pray. They are only permitted to visit the Mount during designated times and must walk on a defined route. Why, it might be asked, should the government of a Jewish state accept the exclusion of Jews from their ancient holy site to appease Palestinians who, if they had the opportunity, would expel Israelis from their Biblical homeland?

Nor is this the first time that an Israeli government has surrendered an ancient Jewish holy site. Following the horrific 1994 massacre by Dr. Baruch Goldstein of 29 Arabs at prayer in the Machpelah burial place of the Biblical patriarchs and matriarchs in Hebron, Jews have been prevented from praying in the magnificent Isaac Hall where the rampage occurred, except for several days annually.

Palestinians, to be sure, are free to claim any ancient Jewish holy site they wish. It is, however, revealing of their own brief history as a self-defined people that they must embrace Jewish history in the ancient Land of Israel – especially holy sites in Jerusalem and Hebron – to bolster their identity.

Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit to the Temple Mount is hardly trespassing. His claim that the Temple Mount is “the most important site in the world to the Jewish people” may be “provocative,” according to the Times. But millennia of Jewish history in Jerusalem justify his claim, no matter how offensive it may be to Israelis on the political left – and to The New York Times.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of twelve books, including Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel 1896-2016, selected for Mosaic by Ruth Wisse and Martin Kramer as a Best Book for 2019

[jacobsvoice]

The New York Times, Zionism and Israel

(December 21, 2022 / JNS) How ironically revealing that The New York Times would choose the pending first day of Hanukkah for an editorial board opinion column entitled, “The Ideal of Democracy in Israel Is in Danger.” As if that was insufficient, Thomas Friedman, for decades the Times’ critic-in-chief of Israel, contributed a two-page rant titled, “What in the World Is Happening in Israel?”

The Times’ Hannukah editorial denounced the Jewish state’s new “far-right” government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu and “ultrareligious and ultranationalist parties,” saying it poses “a significant threat to the future of Israel.”

As for Friedman, he focused on his familiar targets: settlement expansion and the fading two-state solution. Now, he laments, Netanyahu’s election victory assures the “most-nationalist, ultrareligious” government, led by “religious zealots,” in Israeli history.

This is nothing new for the Times. Decades before the rebirth of a Jewish state in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people, the Times displayed discomfort with Zionism and the danger statehood would supposedly pose to the loyalty of American Jews.

Adolph Ochs, who purchased the floundering newspaper in 1896, was proud of his Reform Jewish identity, which defined Judaism solely as a religion, not a nation. Early on, his newspaper was hostile to the Zionist movement and welcomed submissions from wealthy and prominent anti-Zionist American Jews.

According to prosperous banker and philanthropist Jacob Schiff, “The promised land of the Jew” was in America. Zionism, he warned, “threatened the very existence of the Jewish race.” The Times published a critique of Zionism by Dr. Henry Moskowitz, co-founder of the NAACP, who labeled Zionism “romantic and impracticable.” The paper printed a letter from Henry Morgenthau, ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, that identified America as “a holy land,” where Jews “are Jews in religion and Americans in nationality.”

Ochs’s first visit to Jerusalem in 1922 left him “unsympathetic with Zionism,” because “the Jewish religion is secondary.” Speaking at a temple dedication, he declared, “I know nothing else, no other definition for a Jew except religion.” He feared that “Zionist activities in Palestine … would be a menacing danger to Jews throughout the world.”

Adolf Hitler’s rise to power posed a challenge to Ochs. Horrified by Nazi persecution of Jews, he was determined that the Times would not be identified as a Jewish newspaper. He was succeeded by his son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who opposed the identification of Jews as the primary victims of Nazi extermination. The plight of European Jews failed to qualify for the Times’ daily ranking of important events.

The birth of the State of Israel compounded the Times’ Jewish problem, heightening its concern lest a Jewish state compromise the loyalty of American Jews. Once the Times began to post bureau chiefs to Jerusalem, beginning with David Shipler in 1979, its coverage of Israel became more focused, probing and, eventually, relentlessly critical. Fascinated by the struggle between “Arab and Jew,” Shipler understood that the motivation of Jewish settlers was “biblical,” while “a Palestinian people has come not from an ancient source but largely in reaction to the creation and birth of Israel.”

Shipler’s perceptive reporting yielded to Thomas Friedman’s persistent criticism. Chastising Israelis for ignoring the plight of Palestinians, he dismissed terrorist attacks as merely “a continual poke in the ribs” and anticipated that “scary religious nationalist zealots” might lead Israel into the “dark corner” of a “South African future.”

Columnist Anthony Lewis identified the occupation of Judea and Samaria with South African apartheid. Roger Cohen suggested that the U.S. should engage in “hammering” Israel in response to the “scourge” of occupation. Jodi Rudoren wrote preposterously that Israel was building 3,500 new settlements. Following horrific Palestinian terrorist attacks during the second intifada, Times editors held “both sides” responsible. Current Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley refers incessantly to Israeli “occupation” of the Jews’ biblical homeland in Judea and Samaria.

For nearly a century, The New York Times has suffered from Zionism- and Israel-phobia. There is no cure in sight.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of 12 books, including Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel 1896-2016, selected for Mosaic by Ruth Wisse and Martin Kramer as a Best Book for 2019.

[jacobsvoice]

Hady Amir’s Fantasy

Algemeiner (December 2, 2022)

The recent announcement of Hady Amr’s appointment as “special representative for Palestinian affairs” in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs provides a revealing glimpse of the Biden administration’s warped understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

To be sure, Amr is well-suited for his new position. Between 2014-17 he served as Deputy Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations, focusing on economic issues. According to a State Department official the decision to create this new role for Amr is intended to strengthen the relationship between the United States and “Palestine.”

Amr (ponderously) described his objectives: “To advance and work toward equal measures of freedom, security, and prosperity and justice and dignity for the Palestinian people; and to take steps to try to preserve and advance the two-state solution along the 1967 lines.” These lines, to be sure, had prevented Jews from returning to Biblical Judea and Samaria, conquered by the Kingdom of Jordan during Israel’s struggle for independence in 1948.

With unrelenting vagueness Amr has promised “engaging with the Palestinian people and leadership to better understand the challenges we face, and the better to align our policy to address those challenges.” This “unprecedented step forward” in the US-Palestinian relationship, he claims, would elevate “the attention that will be paid to issues of concern to Palestinians in Washington” and “strengthen our bilateral relationship with the Palestinian people.”

Amr proudly asserted that the United States is now “the world’s largest donor to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees” (UNRWA) – having bestowed more than $680 million within the past eighteen months alone. But he evades the reality that fewer than thirty thousand genuine Palestinian refugees from the Arab war in 1947-48 to obliterate the fledgling Jewish state are still living.

Consequently the overwhelming majority of recipients of UNRWA funds are, and forever will be in increasing numbers, the descendants of refugees. Indeed there now are as many UNRWA employees as there are genuine Palestinian refugees. It is, in a word, a scam to which Amr seems oblivious.

But Amir seems to understand that the success of his fantasy depends upon the (unlikely) willingness of Israelis and Palestinians to embrace it. Equating their violence against each other, he ignores the reality of Israeli responses to Palestinian terrorist attacks. Instead he offers reassurance that the United States “cares deeply” and “will continue to address those issues with the parties” - as if American “caring” is sufficient to resolve a decades-old conflict that shows no sign of abating.

Amr describes his appointment as an “unprecedented move” that will “elevate” the relationship between the United States and Palestinians. He makes clear that his primary focus will be “engagement with the Palestinian people and leadership and on Palestinian-related issues with other governments in the region.”

In translation, Amr will become the de facto American representative to “Palestine.” But he will learn, if he does not already know, that Israel is unlikely to abandon Biblical Judea and Samaria (Jordan’s “West Bank” until the Six-Day War) for a Palestinian state.

He might even learn that “Palestine” already exists east of the Jordan River, land that British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill removed from the Balfour Declaration promise (1917) of “the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” It became the Kingdom of Jordan, where more than half the population is now of Palestinian origin.

Before he lacerates Israel for its evil settlements as the primary obstacle to peace with Palestinians - and promotes a Palestinian state in the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people - Hady Amr would benefit from a history lesson. Based on his past priorities, however, it is unlikely that he will learn from it.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of twelve books, including Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel 1896-2016, selected for Mosaic by Ruth Wisse and Martin Kramer as a Best Book for 2019

[jacobsvoice]

Bibi’s Memories and Victories

(December 5, 2022 / JNS) It is not surprising that Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has written a lengthy memoir (654 pages). Bibi, published just as Netanyahu was elected to serve yet another term, is a fascinating—if occasionally tediously detailed—recounting of his remarkable political career.

Netanyahu identifies his “life’s mission” as “to help secure the future of my ancient people who suffered so much and have contributed so much to humanity.” The rebirth of Israel, after millennia during which Jews wandered in the wilderness of dependence upon other nations for their survival, is indeed a miracle of history. Netanyahu fits his life story into that narrative.

For five years after Israel’s stunning victory in the Six-Day War (1967), Netanyahu served as an officer in Sayeret Matkal, the elite special forces unit of the IDF. Relocating to the United States, he graduated from MIT and became Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. Returning to Israel, he was elected to the Knesset in 1988, launching his remarkable political career.

Along the way, there was tragedy as well as triumph. Netanyahu’s beloved older brother Yoni, who had preceded him as an officer in Sayeret Matkal, was murdered in 1976 during the rescue of Israeli hostages held captive by terrorists at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Netanyahu evocatively describes feeling “like a man on a rack whose limbs are torn from him one by one.”

Netanyahu was unrelenting in his ambition and success. In 1996 he defeated Shimon Peres to become Israel’s youngest-ever prime minister. Ever since, he has been on a political rollercoaster. He served as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s minister of foreign affairs and minister of finance before returning as prime minister in 2009, a position he held until 2021 and will now occupy again.

Among the most interesting parts of Netanyahu’s autobiography is the description of his strained relationship with former President Barack Obama, indisputably America’s least Israel-friendly president. Early on, Netanyahu realized that he was “heading into an inevitable confrontation with Israel’s most important ally.” Obama’s “espousal of the Palestinian narrative”—that Israeli Jews are “neo-colonials usurping the land from native Arab inhabitants”—framed their difficult relationship.

Obama seemed determined to “steamroll” Netanyahu into accepting a Palestinian state on the precarious pre-1967 borders that enclosed Israel before it regained biblical Judea and Samaria in the Six-Day War. The president’s insistence on a settlement freeze and two-state solution became an enduring source of contention between them, while Obama’s linkage of the suffering of Palestinians to the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust was, to Netanyahu (and countless others), “outlandish”—if not appalling.

Netanyahu understood that “being a moral people won’t save you from conquest and carnage, which was the history of the Jewish people for two thousand years.” Zionism, he writes, meant “giving the Jewish people the power to defend themselves,” which “was the central mission of my years in office.”

Bibi’s preening occasionally overflows, as when he writes that “Israel’s international standing was boosted by the fact that I was repeatedly ranked by Forbes magazine among the most powerful people in the world.” Or when he lists by name the 19 countries he visited to open new economic and political opportunities for Israel.

Unlike Bibi’s strained relationship with Obama, his rapport with President Donald Trump resulted in significant benefits for Israel. They included American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and the legality of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria. Normalization agreements with Arab countries (known as the Abraham Accords) effectively ended the Palestinian “veto” over Israel-Arab relations.

Netanyahu’s narrative ends in 2020, but having now returned as prime minister, an even longer updated edition of his book is assured. It will surely provide him with a renewed opportunity to bolster his unrivaled stature in Israeli history.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of twelve books, including Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel 1896-2016, selected for Mosaic by Ruth Wisse and Martin Kramer as a Best Book for 2019.

[jacobsvoice]

I Became a Jew in Jerusalem and Hebron

(November 21, 2022 / JNS) Once my bar mitzvah was behind me, I was free to choose my own Jewish path. My parents, children of immigrants from Russia and Romania, exemplified assimilation. They neither denied their Jewish identity nor expressed it, except to light Hanukkah candles and give me holiday gifts. My cousins and friends, like me, were “non-Jewish Jews.” Israel, born after we were, was not part of our lives.

In June 1967, while caring for my baby daughter, I took advantage of her nap to turn on the television. It was just in time to watch exuberant Israeli soldiers, victorious in the Six-Day War, at the Western Wall in Jerusalem as a rabbi joyously blew his shofar to celebrate the Jews’ return to their ancient holy site.

But it was only a momentary connection. It took another six years until I joined a group of “disaffected Jewish academics” for a trip to Israel sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. It transformed my life.

One year later, with a Fulbright fellowship, I became a visiting professor at Tel Aviv University. Rafi, one of my students, was the Kol Yisrael radio broadcaster who had excitedly announced the arrival of Israeli soldiers at the Western Wall that climaxed Israel’s victory. He became one of my best teachers.

Tel Aviv did not spark my interest. But over time I was drawn to two Jewish communities, often castigated by other Jews, at the fringes of Israeli society. In Jerusalem’s Old City, I discovered Ateret Cohanim. It is an organization determined to restore Jewish life outside the Jewish Quarter, where Jews had lived for centuries until waves of Arab violence during Israel’s War of Independence eradicated their presence.

Israel’s stunning victory in the Six-Day War sparked their return. Israeli soldiers walked past the former yeshiva in the Muslim Quarter, and an Arab resident stepped outside and handed them the keys to the library where Torah scrolls and books had been safely hidden for 20 years. Now, once again, it is a flourishing yeshiva.

As if to affirm their presence, an extension of the Western Wall, identified as the Kotel Hakatan (the small wall), was discovered only a few steps from the yeshiva. Today, the Ateret Cohanim community includes hundreds of Jews living in the Muslim and Christian Quarters. I was fascinated by their determination to return, rebuild and expand their decimated community.

Even more riveting, with a far longer history, were the Hebron Jews. The burial site of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs, Hebron was where King David reigned before relocating his throne to Jerusalem. The tiny centuries-old Jewish community, destroyed during violent Arab rioting in 1929, was slowly rebuilt after the Six-Day War despite Israeli government resistance and Arab terrorist attacks.

Intrigued by their unrelenting resolve to return to their ancient holy site and capital city, I was guided to meetings with the founding fathers of the restored community. Like Ateret Cohanim residents, they generously answered my questions and recounted their memories, stimulating my fascination with their Jewish passion, courage and fortitude.

But the Hebron Jewish Quarter, where Arabs are a majority, remains a tiny and vulnerable enclave at the edge of a flourishing Arab city from which Jews are prohibited. Eruptions of Arab violence have taken their toll in Jewish lives, while the Israeli government has severely limited expansion of the community. Access to the stunning Machpelah burial site, where the Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs are entombed, is restricted by Muslim authority and Israeli government acquiescence.

An exception is Shabbat Chayei Sarah (just passed), which observes the Torah portion recounting Abraham’s purchase of a burial site for Sarah, marking the start of Jewish history in the Land of Israel. To attend the Shabbat service in that place on that day (as I have twice done) is to return to the source of Jewish history in the promised land.

Nowhere is Jewish history more deeply embedded than in the Hebron Jewish Quarter and the Old City of Jerusalem. It was there, decades after my bar mitzvah, that I finally—and proudly—embraced my Jewish identity.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of twelve books including Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel (2009).

[jacobsvoice]

Hebron and Jewish Memory

(November 13, 2022 / JNS)

As Nov. 19’s Shabbat Chayei Sarah approaches, we are once again reminded of the prominent place of Hebron in Jewish history. According to the biblical narrative, Abraham’s wife Sarah died in Hebron. As a self-described “sojourner,” Abraham needed permission for a burial site from Ephron, the Hebron landowner. He insisted on paying the full asking price in order to ensure his legal title forever. With the exchange of money for land accepted, Sarah was buried in the cave of Machpelah, where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Rebekah and Leah would also be entombed. According to the Bible, God promised: “To thy seed have I given this land.”

Long before Jerusalem was mentioned in the biblical text as a remote Jebusite hilltop town of little consequence, Hebron had become a holy site. It was there that Jewish history in the Land of Israel began and King David ruled before relocating his throne to Jerusalem.

For many centuries, Hebron’s Jews remained a tiny impoverished community under Muslim control, barely able to gather a minyan for prayer. Prohibited from entering the Machpelah enclosure, they could not ascend beyond the seventh step outside the southeastern wall, where they could squeeze messages through a tiny space between the stones. A Christian visitor described “poor Israelite pilgrims … prostrated, stretching their necks like burrowed foxes in order to try to press their lips against their ancestor’s tomb.”

In the 16th century, Jewish exiles from Spain purchased a courtyard where the Avraham Avinu synagogue was built and still stands. But Jews remained confined to a tiny ghetto, risking harm and even death if they ventured beyond the enclosure. It took another two centuries before the community was significantly enlarged by the arrival of a group of Hasidic Jews. Over time, Hebron was recognized for its Jewish scholarship and learning. By the mid-19th century, the discoveries of archeologists testified to its antiquity. Yeshivas opened and renowned artists David Roberts and B.H. Bartlett focused their talents on the majestic Machpelah holy site.

But in 1929, as violent Arab rioting against a growing Jewish presence swept through Palestine, the Hebron Jewish community was attacked and 67 Jews brutally murdered. Once British soldiers removed the traumatized survivors, no Jews remained in Hebron. In 1948, during Israel’s War of Independence, Hebron was conquered by the Kingdom of Jordan. In the old Jewish Quarter, there were no synagogues or yeshivas. Even the ancient cemetery was desecrated.

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But Jews retained an unyielding attachment—identified as “sacred memory”—to the burial site of their patriarchs and matriarchs. Nineteen years later, during the Six-Day War, Hebron was restored to the Jewish people. For the first time in seven centuries Jews could pray inside the Machpelah enclosure at the tombs of their revered biblical ancestors. The following year, a group of religious Zionists led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger came to Hebron to celebrate Passover and begin to rebuild the destroyed community.

Despite devastating Arab terrorist attacks and Israeli government impediments that rarely permitted Hebron Jews to return to abandoned Jewish property, the Jews of Hebron have remained determined to preserve their biblical legacy. They understand, even if others do not, that if Zionism means the return of Jews to their biblical homeland in the Land of Israel, Hebron cannot be excluded.

Shabbat Chayei Sarah in Hebron is an unrivaled experience. A seemingly endless flow of Jews walk down the hill from nearby Kiryat Arba, flanked by Israeli soldiers for protection against Arab terrorist attacks. Inside the massive Machpelah enclosure, they gather in the magnificent Isaac Hall for the reading of the biblical narrative that recounts when “Abraham buried his wife Sarah in the cave of the field of Machpelah, facing Mamre—now Hebron.”

Shabbat Chayei Sarah recounts the precise moment when the attachment of the Jewish people to Hebron and the Land of Israel was forever sealed. It testifies to the enduring power of Jewish history and memory in our promised land.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel (2009).

[jacobsvoice]

Thomas Friedman’s Fury

November 7, 2022 / JNS) New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is distraught. Nothing could be worse, he appears to think, than Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent reelection as Israel’s prime minister. Netanyahu’s new governing coalition, Friedman warns, will comprise “a rowdy alliance of ultra-Orthodox leaders and ultranationalist politicians, including some outright racist, anti-Arab Jewish extremists.”

This “previously unthinkable reality,” Friedman asserts, raises “a fundamental question” that will “roil synagogues in America and across the globe.” The congregants will ask: “Do I support this Israel or not support it?” The issue will also “haunt” pro-Israel college students, “challenge” Israel’s Arab allies, “stress” American diplomats who have “reflexively defended Israel as a Jewish democracy” and send congressional friends of Israel “fleeing” from “such a religious-extremist-inspired government.”

In the worst possible insult, Friedman identifies Netanyahu’s pursuit of “illiberal” Israeli voters with former President Donald Trump’s preference for “white nationalism.” He anticipates that, with Netanyahu’s election, “we are truly entering a dark tunnel.”

In fact, it is Friedman who long ago entered a “dark tunnel” with his relentless hostility towards Israel. As a Brandeis University student, he joined a “Middle East Peace Group” that discounted Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis as “clearly not representative of the diverse elements of the Palestinian people”—as though that mattered to murdered Jews.

Hired by the Times in 1981, Friedman was posted to Beirut after Israel invaded Lebanon to halt PLO terrorist attacks. Friedman described a massacre of Palestinians by Christian Phalangists as “a blot on Israel and the Jewish people” that erased “every illusion [he] ever held about the Jewish state.” That Israel did not commit the massacre was irrelevant to Friedman. No matter who did what, Israel was to blame.

Appointed the Times Jerusalem Bureau chief, Friedman found endless opportunities to criticize Israel. Relying on a Peace Now advocate and a liberal rabbi as his primary sources, his main targets for criticism were “rigorously” Orthodox Jews and malevolent Israeli settlers. Palestinian violence was justified as “spontaneous acts of a people being occupied by another people.”

In his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, published a year after his return to the U.S., Friedman concluded that Israel’s stunning victory in the Six-Day War and its “occupation” of “Palestinian” land (i.e., biblical Judea and Samaria) had led to the Jewish state’s moral decline. Dismissing Palestinian terrorist attacks as merely a “poke in the ribs,” he expressed surprise that the words “Palestinian” and “terrorist” were linked, absurdly describing their violent attacks against Israeli civilians as “relatively non-lethal civil disobedience.”

As a Times columnist, Friedman warned that without a two-state solution, “Israel will be stuck with an apartheid-like, democracy-sapping, permanent occupation of the West Bank.” He attacked “far-right settler activists” who were “so arrogant and so indifferent to U.S. concerns” as to announce plans for new settlements. Unless Israel froze settlement activity, Friedman claimed, it could become “some kind of apartheid-like state” led by “scary religious nationalist zealots” who could lead Israel into the “dark corner” of a “South African future.”

In 2015, as a prelude to his current concerns, Friedman asked whether “a Jewish democratic Israel survives” a Netanyahu election victory. It did. Israel’s retention of settlements, he warned, ensures that Israel “could no longer be a Jewish democracy.” It still is.

Friedman’s relentless criticism of Israel is, to be sure, a perfect fit for the Times, which for decades has concocted reasons to lacerate the Jewish state.

Netanyahu’s latest election victory has sent shivers through the halls of the paper of record. Indeed, Friedman’s unrelenting criticism has been embraced by Jerusalem Bureau Chief Patrick Kingsley. Obsessed with Israel’s “occupied territories,” mentioned three times in the first five paragraphs of his post-election article, Kingsley focused on the victorious “far-right alliance” that distresses Palestinians and, clearly, the Times.

The New York Times will never make peace with the existence of a Jewish state in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. As Thomas Friedman and Patrick Kingsley demonstrate, any opportunity to flagellate Israel is irresistible.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of twelve books, including Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel 1896-2016, selected for Mosaic by Ruth Wisse and Martin Kramer as a Best Book for 2019.

[jacobsvoice]

Unsettled by Settlements

(October 21, 2022 / JNS)

New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Patrick Kingsley has an Israeli “occupation” obsession. One month into his new position (February 2021) he identified the Palestinian city of Ramallah as “the hub of the occupied West Bank.” The Palestinian Authority, Kingsley has written, “oversees parts of the occupied territories.” In his opinion Jewish settlements in “occupied territories” are the major obstacle to peace with Palestinians.

In his most recent iteration (Oct. 15) Kingsley referred to Israel’s “occupied West Bank,” “the occupied territories,” “the 55-year occupation” and “Israeli occupation.” But Kingsley is not the first Times reporter to fixate on settlements as the major obstacle to peace with Palestinians, the better to blame Israel for Palestinian intransigence.

Leading the way was Thomas Friedman, Jerusalem Bureau Chief between 1984-88 and a columnist ever since. Settlements, he wrote, are “insane,” “a cancer for the Jewish people” that “threatens the entire Zionist enterprise.” Israel’s “colonial occupation” (of its biblical homeland) expressed “insatiable appetites” for “Palestinian land.” Settlement building, he insisted, was “sheer madness.” Friedman absurdly equated Jewish settlers with Palestinian suicide bombers.

Friedman, like his Times successors, is oblivious to history. It was Arabs who occupied land promised to the Jewish people by the Balfour Declaration (1917), when British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour conveyed British government endorsement of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

But where was “Palestine?” Its boundaries were redefined, and sharply narrowed, after World War I when the land east of the Jordan River was gifted by Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for the Colonies, to Abdullah bin al-Hussein for his own kingdom. Then, during Israel’s war of independence, the kingdom of Jordan seized land west of the Jordan River that had comprised Biblical Judea and Samaria. Obliterating Jewish history, it became known as Jordan’s “West Bank.” Not until Israel’s stunning victory in the Six-Day War (1967) was that land restored to the Jewish people. Despised Jewish “settlers,” following in the path of their Zionist predecessors, soon began the return to their biblical homeland.

Times bureau chiefs and columnists have been unrelenting in their criticism of settlers. Serge Schmemann blamed “the fears and passions of the settlers” for the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—although his assassin lived in the Tel Aviv suburb of Herzliya. Steven Erlanger, oblivious to the prominent place of Hebron in Jewish history, described its tiny Jewish neighborhood as “occupied” by settlers.

The litany of criticism was endless. Editorial page editor Jack Rosenthal warned that “the more settlements, the more Israelis desensitize to the odious idea of dominating others.” Columnist Roger Cohen cited Israel’s “self-defeating expansion of settlements.” To columnist Anthony Lewis, “occupied territories” by settlers reveal that Israel “does not live up to minimum standards of humanity.”

Times editors, convinced that settlements undermined Israeli democracy, were stunned by a report from former Israeli Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy concluding that settlements were legal under international law. The rule of law, often defended by the Times as its standard for criticism of Israel, was suddenly irrelevant once it protected settlements. An editorial criticized “the aggressive new push to expand settlements.”

Times laceration of settlements was relentless. Friedman criticized “scary religious nationalist zealots” who were “so arrogant, and so indifferent to U.S. concerns” as to announce the plan for new settlements—as though Israelis must not act without American approval. Otherwise, he imagined, Israel could become “an apartheid-like state.” For Roger Cohen, troubled by a “religious-nationalist push to keep all the land” (including its biblical homeland), “messianic” settlers undermined the principles of “freedom, justice and peace” embedded in Israel’s Proclamation of Independence.

Now the Times has Patrick Kingsley to castigate the return of Jews to their Biblical homeland. Yet, ironically, it is Palestinians who occupy Jewish land in biblical Judea and Samaria. Unfit to print, the Times is not likely to notice.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of 12 books including Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel (2009).

[jacobsvoice]

The Belated Birth of a Jew

If I was planning my farewell visit to Israel, where would I go and why? Since 1972, many visits and two year-long stays have provided ample opportunities to select my favorite places. My choices, I realized, were determined by the Jew I was not.

I grew up, as did everyone I knew, with grandparents who were immigrants from Eastern Europe and parents who were assimilated Jews with little expression of their Jewish identity. Baseball games were far more alluring to me than Shabbat candle-lighting or synagogue services, which were never part of my boyhood. Only Hanukkah penetrated my Jewish indifference, largely because I enjoyed the nightly flickering candle-lights and the gifts I received from my parents. I intuited that my bar mitzvah would mark my exit from Judaism. So it did.

Nothing changed until I was in my mid-30s, when I crossed paths with a former colleague who had just returned from a trip to Israel for disaffected Jewish academics. I instantly knew that I qualified for such a trip and I made my first visit to Israel in 1973. Unexpectedly fascinated, and eager for more time for exploration and discovery, I applied for and received a Fulbright professorship at Tel Aviv University. I commuted weekly from Jerusalem, my newly chosen home away from home.

During the decades that followed, many visits to Israel and another year in Jerusalem transformed my life. My years as an assimilated Jew faded away as my time in Israel increased. But not everywhere in Israel. The noisy bustle of Tel Aviv had little appeal. But Jerusalem, especially the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of Mea Shearim and Sha’arei Hesed, were another story. I was fascinated by the Jews who were least like me. They lived in self-enclosed communities, seemingly oblivious to the world beyond their borders.

In the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, I was immediately drawn to the Western Wall. Whether outside on the plaza or inside the chamber, I watched and listened as Jews prayed at the site of the ancient Jewish Temples, as they had millennia before the appearance of conquering Muslims who replaced the Temples with the Dome of the Rock. Although I occasionally followed the practice of wedging a note between the stones, I remained an observer, not a participant.

Inside the high-ceilinged chamber, the echoing sound of prayer was inspirational and soothing. I was intrigued by elderly bearded men who leaned against the Wall as they prayed silently and by young Orthodox boys whose teachers led them in circles of joyful song. So had religious observance passed from generation to generation.

Long before Jerusalem became a Jewish holy site and capital city, Hebron—less than 20 miles south—was embedded in Jewish history. There, according to the biblical narrative, Abraham purchased a burial cave, the first Jewish-owned site in the Promised Land, for Sarah. The Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs who followed were entombed there and King David ruled from Hebron before relocating his throne to Jerusalem.

I caught a glimpse of Hebron during my first visit to Israel. As we passed the towering Machpelah burial site, my interest was sparked. I was eager to return and learn more about the place of Hebron in Jewish history and the Israelis who had been determined to restore the Jewish community that was decimated during Arab riots in 1929.

Over time, as my fascination with Hebron deepened, I met with the leaders of the return of Jews following the Six-Day War. They taught me about Hebron history and the obstacles they confronted: Hostile, at times murderous Arabs; an Israeli government that had little interest in supporting their effort; and Israelis on the left who yearned for “peace now” and blamed settlers for obstructing it. As a historian and a Jew, I was captivated.

So it was that my years of indifference toward and distance from Judaism and the Jewish state were finally erased by my time in the ancient holy cities of Jerusalem and Hebron. There, I finally discovered my Jewish self.

JNS  (October 3, 2022)

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of twelve books including Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel (2009).

[jacobsvoice]

Remembering Elyakim Haetzni

(September 21, 2022 / JNS) Immediately following Israel’s stunning triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War, several Israelis gathered to plan the return to Gush Etzion, just south of Jerusalem, which had been decimated during Israel’s struggle for independence 19 years earlier.

Among them was Elyakim Haetzni, who had arrived in Palestine from Germany as a 12-year-old in 1938 following the Kristallnacht pogroms. Severely wounded during the Independence War, he survived and became a successful Tel Aviv lawyer. Israel’s “miraculous victory” in 1967 inspired him to relocate to Hebron, the ancient capital city ruled by King David, whose millennia-old Jewish community had been destroyed in an Arab massacre in 1929.

In April 1968, several dozen Israelis, Haetzni and his family among them, celebrated Passover in Hebron. The Seder became “a once in a lifetime experience” for him. There, he realized, “I am at home, in the bosom of Abraham.” Jewish identity, he believed, “has to do with a historical link to people and places of the past” and Hebron is “part of our genetic code.” With his family, he moved to Kiryat Arba, a new community uphill from Hebron.

A highly respected lawyer, Haetzni represented both Jews and Arabs. But his commitment to Israeli settlers was unyielding, defending their right to disobey government orders commanding them to abandon their homes in Judea and Samaria.

“We are,” he insisted, “loyal to the covenant with God.” Responding to a Labor government’s inclination to relinquish portions of the biblical homeland to Arab rule, he asserted, “Even if 100% of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel should vote for its separation from the Land of Israel, that ‘hundred percent consensus’ would not have any more validity than the ‘hundred percent consensus’ that prevailed within the people of Israel when it danced around the golden calf.”

Haetzni was sharply critical of radical settlers who launched violent retaliatory attacks against Palestinians, condemning “the religious deviation” expressed by their attempts to hasten the arrival of the messiah with guns and dynamite. He insisted that, in the Land of Israel, Arabs may be gerim (strangers), just as Jews had been strangers in Egypt, but their lives must be protected. He lacerated rabbis who failed to admonish their followers with the biblical commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” From 1990-1992, Haetzni served in the Knesset as a member of the right-wing religious-nationalist Tehiya party.

While researching what became my history of the Hebron Jews, I had the pleasure of meeting Haetzni in his Kiryat Arba apartment. He welcomed me to the living room, where each wall contained shelves of books in several languages from ceiling to floor. In his soft-spoken way, he guided me through the return of the Jews to their ancient capital city following the Six-Day War, modestly avoiding his own pivotal role in this rebirth. After our illuminating conversation ended, he and his wife kindly drove me downhill to Beit Hadassah, a former medical clinic now inhabited by several Israeli families who, like Haetzni, were pioneers of the return to Hebron.

Elyakim Haetzni, identified as “a man who lived and breathed Zionism,” has been eulogized as “a founding father” of the settlement movement, a man of “leadership and kindness” who “stayed dedicated to the people of Israel and the State of Israel until his last day.” Although we spent little more than an hour together, he was a vital source for my understanding of the determination of Jews, few as they may have been, to restore life to Hebron and reclaim the city’s place in Jewish history. He was a passionate, if soft-spoken, leader; anything but the caricature of the “fanatic” that has invited attacks on settlers for the “crime” of returning to biblical Judea and Samaria. I will always cherish our time together.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of 12 books including Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel (2009).

[jacobsvoice]

The New York Times, Zionism and Israel

(September 13, 2022 / JNS) Nearly a century ago, The New York Times hired Joseph W. Levy, who had spent his boyhood in Jerusalem, as its foreign correspondent in Palestine. Fascinated with archeological discoveries that affirmed the truth of the biblical narrative, Levy admired Zionist land development and the newly founded Hebrew University. He enthusiastically embraced the Zionist narrative of a previously barren land suddenly “flowing with milk and honey.” He admired “the new type of Jew” who was “a member of the chosen people, once again a free citizen in his ancestral homeland.”

The eruption of murderous Arab violence in 1929—when Jews were slaughtered in their ancient capital cities of Hebron and Jerusalem—shocked Levy. Nevertheless, he blamed Zionists for their failure to establish “friendly relationships and cooperation” with local Arabs. His evident anti-Zionist bias would remain the hallmark of Times coverage of Palestine, and eventually, Israel.

Jewish statehood was staunchly opposed by the Times, lest it compromise the loyalty of American Jews to their home country. Publisher Adolph Ochs, a committed Reform Jew, insisted that Judaism was a religion only, not a national identity. His Sulzberger family successors embraced his discomfort with Zionism and the idea, no less reality, of Jewish statehood.

The birth of the modern-day State of Israel has remained problematic for the Times ever since. It became evident once Thomas L. Friedman was appointed Jerusalem bureau chief in 1984. He was an unrelenting critic of Israel for its “occupation” of Jordan’s West Bank—biblical Judea and Samaria. Jewish settlers were repeatedly blamed for obstructing peace with Palestinians, who showed no sign of wanting it.

Returning to Washington in 1988, Friedman’s newly published From Beirut to Jerusalem emphasized Israel’s occupation of “Palestinian” land, leading to its moral decline. He celebrated the emergence of Palestinians as a “people,” absurdly identifying their violent intifada with the American struggle for civil rights and equating Jewish settlers with Palestinian suicide bombers.

Several Jewish Jerusalem bureau chiefs followed in Friedman’s footsteps. Serge Schmemann blamed “the bellicose settlers of Hebron” for the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a resident of a Tel Aviv suburb. After a Likud election victory, Joel Brinkley warned of “a right-wing theocracy.” Steven Erlanger blamed Israeli governments for failing to confront “extreme and ideological” settlers, who he equated with Hamas.

Jodi Rudoren, who grew up in an Orthodox family, focused on Israeli responsibility for Palestinian suffering. Following the murder of three rabbis in a Jerusalem synagogue, she blamed “extremists on both sides.” A Times editorial described it as “a tragedy for all Israelis and Palestinians.”

Times Jewish columnists have been incessantly critical of Israel. Roger Cohen warned that it “cannot remain a Jewish and democratic state” with its “undemocratic system of oppression in territory under its control, … inflicting on disenchanted Palestinians the very exclusion Jews lived” for centuries. Its “corrosive business of occupation” and “messianic religious Greater Israel nationalism” threatened democracy.

No columnist lacerated Israeli settlements more persistently than Anthony Lewis. Identifying himself as a “friend of Israel,” he equated Israeli “occupation” (of its biblical homeland) by “Jewish zealots” with South African apartheid. Settlement, he asserted, “mocks the tradition of Jews as a people of law.”

Echoing Lewis’s absurd analogy Friedman feared that “scary religious nationalist zealots” might lead Israel into the “dark corner” of a “South African future.”

Friedman has remained an unrelenting critic of Israel. He yearns for a “two-state” solution with Palestine occupying biblical Judea and Samaria. Otherwise, Israel will “be stuck with an apartheid-like, democracy-sapping” occupation. He believes that his repetitive castigation of Israel helps it to preserve its moral integrity. In fact, it reinforces his stature as the most unrelenting Times critic since Joseph Levy paved the way nearly a century ago.

How ironic that a newspaper with Jewish publishers for nearly a century that has employed a stream of Jewish reporters, Jerusalem bureau chiefs and columnists should engage in unrelenting criticism of the world’s only Jewish state.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of 12 books, including “Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel (1896-2016).”