Getting Back on Track

In the aftermath of Oct 7, the extent of antisemitism was not generated, it was exposed. The anti-Israel elite universities, the media, and the usual gaggle of Marxist inspired antisemites of the BDS, CRT, and DEI gulags were newly emboldened by America’s progressive-woke policy is to show a balanced approach between Hamas terrorists and Israelis.

The baked in failure of that approach is that the Palestinian Arabs are not yet convinced that Israel is home to stay. They live with the illusion that if they terrorize Israel long and often enough, the Jews will pack their bags and slink away to other climes. The cries of “Go back to Poland” reveals the desire of Jew haters to not only expel Jews from Israel, but to send them back to Poland and the gas chambers of: Chelmo, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Until the Palestinian Arabs accept the fact that Israel is here to stay, there will be no peace agreement; the only permanent resolution to the conflict would be to dash their hopes by utterly defeating them. To paraphrase what Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in his groundbreaking essay, “The Iron Wall,” until the Arabs are absolutely convinced there is no alternative to accepting the presence of Jews in the Holy Land, they will revert to the eradication of Jews.

The so-called innocent Gaza civilians celebrated the Oct 7 massacre by handing out sweets and dancing in the streets. And now the world expects Israel to feed them. Who fed the German and Japanese civilians when America bombed them into oblivion. Iran, who has money enough to supply bombs to their terrorist proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, runs short of funds when it comes to feeding Gazans. And the world remains silent in the face of such hypocrisy.

The so-called ‘moderate’ Abbas, who denied the Holocaust ever happened or if it did was not so bad as it is made out to be, hoodwinked the Biden administration into believing he was the partner for peace. The leftist and antisemites latched on to that fairytale but Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump did not. As far back as the late 1980’s, I had a one-on-one conversation with Bibi Netanyahu via the nascent internet, which was called the BITNET, a co-operative US university computer network founded in 1981. It allowed university students and faculty worldwide to communicate via the internet. During my brief chat with Netanyahu, I asked him the following question, “Do you trust Yasser Arafat?” to which he replied, “No, do you?” I suspect today his answer would apply to Abbas as well.

The Biden administration has done great damage to Israel and the United States by peddling the Marxist myth of “oppressors” and the “oppressed.,” with its support of DEI and CRT. According to that belief America and Israel are racist and colonial, therefore they are manifestations of evil, consequently deserving of whatever befalls them. For the left-leaning academics, university students, and media, holding to the view that the world consists of the “haves” and “have nots,” who regularly engage in lecturing, shunning, and attacking those of us who do not subscribe to the foolishness of the progressive-woke ideology, a rude awakening has arrived.

More recently, the oppressor vs. oppressed policies which emerged during the Obama and Biden administrations and was used to justify their vacillating and flagging support for Israel. The Hamas charter calls for the elimination of Israel as the Jewish state, and the people of Gaza overwhelmingly voted for the terrorists of Hamas to govern them, which explains why Hamas and Abbas have turned down all offers for a Palestinian Arab state. Their reason for refusing a two-state solution is because creating a Palestinian state is not their primary objective, their goal is the eradication of the Jewish state of Israel.

The United States is the largest funder of UNRWA. It is an arm of the UN that served as a Hamas missile launching pad, weapons storage facility, and cover for digging terror tunnels. Also, at least a dozen UNRWA employees were active Hamas terrorists. Unfortunately, the Biden administration was more interested in getting aid to Gazans than securing the release of hostages and getting rid of Hamas. I do not recall the United States, England or any other ally sending food to Germany or Japan during WWII. Yet, Israel is expected to send aid to the very people who celebrated the Oct 7 pogrom.

It has been a long-established taboo for governments to not meddle into the legitimacy of allies, yet the Biden administration did just that. The then Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer castigated the Netanyahu administration for not bending to the will of the Biden administration and asked Israel to call for new elections. Wiser heads prevailed and elections were not held. The pattern of creating daylight between the United States and Israel initiated by Obama continued during the Biden administration. Their antipathy toward Israel was manifest in the hatred of Netanyahu and in America, it was his counterpart, Donald Trump.

Shortly after Albert Einstein’s arrival to the United States, after escaping death at the hands of the Nazi regime, it did not take him long to recognize the pervasive antisemitism among the students and faculty of America’s universities. He confided in a letter to a friend, “Unfortunately, the current Jewish leaders do not comprehend the seriousness of the situation, similar to the German Jews in the time before Hitler.” He decried their silence and disregard for the looming threat. He became convinced that the Jews needed a state of their own in their ancestral homeland of Israel, the land where Jewish residence and history predates Islam by two thousand years.

To his credit, President Truman acted against the advice of his strongly antisemitic State Department. He was the first to recognize the nascent rebirth of Israel. President Ronald Reagan was mocked and castigated for his idea of developing a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which Senator Edward Kennedy derisively labeled as “Star Wars.” At that time, Senator Joe Biden, excoriated both Reagan and the “Star Wars” project. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and Reagan and later Israel ignored Kennedy’s and Biden’s criticisms of creating a missile defense system which resulted in the development of the “Iron Dome,” a missile defensive system that saved countless Israeli lives.

Despite the fact Israel had over a million Arabs living in Israel, when Arab nations allowed virtually no Jews living in their countries, and despite America’s financial support of United Nations, its members succumbed to the anti-Israel rants of terrorists like Yassar Arafat, to such an extent that the General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which defined Zionism as a form of racism. The outcome of that shameful resolution equated any Jew who advocated for the return of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland as a racist. On Nov. 16, 1991, UN rescinded, the reprehensible Res. 3379, thus determining that Zionism is decidedly not a form of racism.

Some years later and along the same anti-Israel lines, Obama said he wanted to create some daylight between the close relationship the US had with Israel. As a parting shot as he was leaving office, Obama did not veto UN Resolution 2334, which designated all territories which Israel held since 1967, as occupied territories  including Jerusalem and the Kotel. His action or lack thereof, was the worst diplomatic blow Israel ever suffered under any American administration.

Obama was not the only president whose antipathy toward the Jewish State of Israel was palpable. Jimmy Carter wrote a highly controversial book entitled, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which falsely accused Israel being an apartheid state, when it is decidedly the only country in the Middle East that is not.

When Trump became president, it was a refreshing change for Israel, as he not only recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, but he also moved the Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He also recognized the Golan Heights as belonging to Israel. And most astoundingly he was instrumental in facilitating the Abraham Accords.

When Trump lost the White House in 2020, things went south and soured between Biden as Israel. Although Biden initially was supportive of Israel after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct7, 2023, his support diminished as pressure from within his party, and notably from the Squad began to weigh on him. Biden tried to walk a tightrope between supporting Israel and not alienating the Muslim voters of his party. In short, his vacillation lowered the window of opportunity for Israel to wipe out Hamas.

Hopefully, under the new Trump administration, Israel will get back on track and regain the full support of the United States, thus enabling a Israel-United States coalition to disable Hamas’s ability to repeat the atrocities of Oct 7.