Photo Credit: Hadas Paruch / Flash 90
At the Western Wall

{Originally posted to the authors’ blogsite, Israel Thrives}

There are two points concerning Jews and Israel that I very much want to get across to the politically-inclined.

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The first: The day of the dhimmi is done.

No longer will we allow ourselves to be pushed around as pawns in someone else’s political game. Nor will we allow non-Jews, like Barack Obama, to tell us where we may, or may not, be allowed to live within our own ancestral homeland.

The second: The Oslo process is dead.

It is a corpse. It is a dead albatross around the Jewish neck that is very much in need of removal and burial. I am half a world away and I can still smell the stench.


As a diaspora Jew, I am exceedingly reluctant to tell Israel what to do, but that does not always stop me.

In that spirit, Israel should declare its final borders and remove the IDF to behind those borders. But it should be up to the Israelis to decide what those borders will be because after 2,000 years of European abuse – consecutive with 1,300 years of Arab-Muslim enforced dhimmi status in the Middle East – the Jews have, by any ethical standard, earned the right of self-determination on the land that our people come from.

Anything less is an insult to social justice, universal human rights, and basic concepts of Enlightenment liberalism. It is also a direct kick in the head to the Jewish people and we do not need to put up with it.

Furthermore, and more importantly, it is only the Jews of the Middle East who give a rip about the wellbeing of their children, such as the brave young woman pictured above.

Thus I consider the recent “outpost law” or “regulation bill” a hopeful sign.

As blogger Ruth Lieberman put it:

Yesterday the Israeli Knesset passed the ‘Regulations Bill’ into law. To simplify, this law creates a legal framework for dealing with homes that were built over decades. It provides 125% compensation to absentee owners whose non-residential land was accidentally built on.

The thing about this law that makes it controversial is that is contested by those who would rather hand over these lands to some independent Arab rule — perhaps the Palestinian Authority but their sincerity has come into question — in a diplomatic solution. But that’s politics, and it has no place in a legal discussion.

Everything, as always, is volatile in that neck of the universe. The Palestinian-Arabs are screaming from the hillsides about dire consequences if Trump moves the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and I am not the least bit confident that he will keep that campaign promise.

And, of course, the major European players are less than happy about the new law.

Raphael Ahren, writing in the Times of Israel, tells us:

Germany on Wednesday harshly criticized Israel for passing the Regulation Law earlier this week, saying the new legislation undermines trust in Israel’s willingness to reach a negotiated peace agreement with the Palestinians.

“The confidence we had in the Israeli government’s commitment to the two-state solution has been profoundly shaken,” a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry in Berlin said in a statement.

In a related article by the Times of Israel we learn that the French are making similar grunting noises:

The French ambassador to Israel on Wednesday said a new law legalizing West Bank outposts built on private Palestinian land damaged Israel’s credibility in the eyes of the international community.

Israel has come under harsh censure since lawmakers passed the Regulation Law Monday, with the UN saying it crossed a “thick red line,” and other members of the international community warning the measure would make peace efforts more difficult.

“This is troubling for the international community, who is wondering if she should trust Israel when Israel says it’s ready to discuss with its neighbor, the Palestinians, to reach an agreement on the two-state solution,” ambassador Hélène Le Gal told Army Radio in an English-language interview.

This, my friends, is a sucker’s game and you’re the suckers. As we say in poker, if you look around the table and you’re not sure who the fish is, it is you.

“Oslo” is a way for European governments to twist Jewish arms behind Jewish backs in order to maintain what I call the Non-Peace Process, which, as of the Obama administration, looked something like this:

1) The US and the EU demand negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

2) The parties agree to talk and then the PA, the US, and the EU demand various concessions from Israel for the great privilege of sitting down with the PA’s foremost undertaker.

3) Israel fails to meet all the concessions, thus causing the PA to flee negotiations, which they never had any intention of concluding to begin with.

4)  The PA and the EU and the Obama administration place the blame for failure at Jewish feet.

5)  The EU and various European countries announce additional sanctions, thereby essentially joining the anti-Semitic anti-Zionist BDS brigade.

6)  Jihadis seek to murder Jews.

It should be obvious by now that the Palestinian-Arabs have no intention whatsoever in accepting a state for themselves in peace next to Israel. They have turned down every single offer since the Peel Commission of 1937.

There comes a point, therefore, where we must accept that “no means no.”

But look what they could have had if they had simply accepted Jewish sovereignty on a miniscule, hatchet-shaped bit of land in north-west Israel eighty years ago.

Merely by saying “yes” the Arabs could have had not only all of “Transjordan” – which, in itself, represented almost three-quarters of the British Mandate of Palestine – but all the rest of Israel, as well, with the tiny exception of that completely indefensible strip of land bordering the Mediterranean.

Even Jerusalem – which the Arabs only care about out of some petty theological need to keep Jews from sovereignty on the central site of our historical heritage – would have been under the control of non-Jews.

Muhammad, it needs to be remembered, never stepped foot in that city.

Furthermore, the Oslo “peace process” had nothing to do with peace. It was merely a way for the Arabs and the European Union and the Obama administration to justify violence against the Jews of the Middle East because they do not honestly approve of the fact of Israel to begin with. If the Palestinians wanted a state for themselves in peace next to Israel they could have had one many times over, but that is not what they want.

What they want is Israel dead and everyone knows it.

Yet, decade upon decade the tiny Jewish minority in the Middle East make concessions for peace while many within the vast Arab population openly screech for Jewish blood. The West then uses that screeching as a justification for what they believe to be “understandable” violence by local Arabs against regular Jewish Israelis, if not Jews the world over.

For thirteen-hundred years the Jews lived as dhimmis. That is, they lived as second and third-class non-citizens under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperial rule.

Now, with an Israel Hater out of the White House and with Trump, whatever he is, in the White House, it is the time for Israel and for the Jewish people to stand up and declare that the days of desperate Jewish solicitude are over. The enemies of the Jewish people will accuse Israel – and, by extension, world Jewry – of gross immorality in its treatment of the Palestinian-Arabs. And we must not hesitate to hit them back with the truth of their racist hypocrisy every single time.

Israel Haters do not care about social justice or human rights. Is that not obvious? If they did they might look up for a moment at a world roiling with the most horrendous human rights violations all around them. The rest of the Middle East makes Israel look like a human rights Shangri-la.

And, speaking as an American, please keep in mind that jihadi and progressive-left hatred toward the Jews of the Middle East is not limited to the Jews of the Middle East. As Tammi Benjamin of the Amcha Initiative can well attest, our young people are being harassed, sometimes violently, not just on European soil… where it is now commonplace… but on American university campuses, as well. And they do so, in ironic cringe-worthiness, under the banners of social justice and universal human rights.

 


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Michael Lumish is a PhD in American history from the Pennsylvania State University and has taught at PSU, San Francisco State University, and the City College of San Francisco. He regularly publishes on the Arab-Israel conflict at his own blog, Israel Thrives (http://israel-thrives.blogspot.com/). Lumish is also the founding editor of the scholarly on-line discussion forum H-1960s. He can be contacted at [email protected].