Behind The Curtain (I)
Jason Maoz’s comprehensive analysis of the recent ominous rise in anti-Israel rage is spot-on (”Behind the Curtain of Anti-Israel Rage,” front page essay, Oct. 24).
What is particularly shocking is that unlike the openly anti-Semitic hatred of the past, the recent vicious attacks on Israel have come from seemingly civilized persons and governments who have validated the Palestinian narrative.
Fay Dicker
Lakewood, NJ
Behind The Curtain (II)
Many thanks to The Jewish Press and Jason Maoz for the well-researched front-page essay on anti-Israel rage. I can recall how the media started to turn on Israel in the late 1970s and how stunned many of us were when that new animus toward Israel was made so absolutely clear in the summer of 1982.
I remember watching an NBC Nightly News telecast during the height of the fighting in Lebanon and seeing the late, normally mild-mannered anchor John Chancellor spewing hate at Israel.
An article I saved from that time quotes Chancellor, who was reporting from Beirut, angrily asking, “What’s an Israeli army doing here in Beirut?” and then answering his own question by sputtering that “we are now dealing with an imperial Israel which is solving its problems in someone else’s county…. [this] is not the Israel we’ve seen in the past.”
I never watched Chancellor again after that revealing performance.
Isaac Rosen
(Via E-Mail)
Behind The Curtain (III)
Journalists weren’t alone in turning on Israel in the years following the 1967 Six-Day War. Certainly by the late 1970s, Europeans had ditched any of the post-Holocaust guilt they may have been suffering and European governments enthusiastically took up the Palestinian cause.
Likening Israel to Nazi Germany became increasingly popular among European intellectuals and politicians. Swedish Prime Minster Olof Palme, to cite just one prominent example, had this to say during the 1982 Lebanon war:
“Those of us who are part of my generation were very young when we saw the pictures of the Jewish children in Hitler’s concentration camps, and we felt pained when we realized the atrocities being done against them. Now we feel the same pain, seeing the Palestinian children of Lebanon who are being persecuted in the exact same way. But this time it is Israel who is the persecutor.”
Joseph Hart
Jerusalem
A Family’s Torah Dedication (I)
Kudos to the Kamaras family for honoring both a beloved family member and our nation’s armed forces in such a unique and meaningful way (“A Family’s Torah Scroll for the U.S. Military,” op-ed, Oct. 24).
The writer of the article, Jacob Kamaras, obviously comes from a very fine family. I hope other families will follow their wonderful example.
Leah Gordon
(Via E-Mail)
A Family’s Torah Dedication (II)
Jacob Kamaras brought tears to my eyes with his account of his family’s decision to dedicate a sefer Torah to the memory of a departed loved one and present it to the U.S. military for use by Jewish soldiers.
Too many of us take for granted the freedoms we enjoy in this country and the sacrifices made by those who protect us and allow those freedoms to flourish.
Michael Jacobson
(Via E-Mail)
Are We Our Brothers’ Keeper?
On Saturday night in downtown Jerusalem, my political antennae picked up a strong signal as I came across a gathering of about a hundred young people, clearly secular, some carrying signs.
Curious, I questioned a few of them. Their signs, in Hebrew and Arabic, protested Jewish “racism” against Arabs in Israel.
Leaflets they were distributing denounced a candidate for chief rabbi of Jerusalem, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, the current chief rabbi of the city of Safed. The rabbi is one of the lightning rods of the left due to his firm stance on trying to keep Safed as Jewish as possible.