The Settlers

Probably the stupidest thing that the progressive-left has done as a group, in regards the I-P conflict, was demonize the so-called "settlers" in Judea and Samaria, what the Jordanians dubbed "the West Bank" in order to erase Jewish history there.

Not only is it entirely racist to target that specific group of people as something akin to evil merely for living, or building, where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton do not want them to, but it is also entirely counterproductive toward any future peace.

It's also illiberal, by the way.

This is fine for your average bottom-feeding anti-Zionist or Israel Hater, because they do not want peace anyway. People like, say, Lefty Coaster absolutely love the settlers because the settlers are within the boundaries of acceptable progressive-left hatred. Because the Obama administration, and the progressive-left as a whole, has validated Jew Hatred if it is directed at those Jews, anti-Zionists feel more than free to spew forth absolutely monstrous hatred, even hatred sufficient to justify genocide, sufficient to justify the beheading of a three month old baby girl, in the minds of some.

What saddens me the most, I think, is that this hatred is also validated by many liberal Jews who seem to share Barack Obama's belief that Jews may live here, but not there. They may build homes and rec centers and second bathrooms in the ghetto, but not beyond. I frankly find it amazing... stupifying, really... how easily people slide into this casual racism that has the delicious side effect of entirely screwing up any prospects for a negotiated solution.

Progressive-left attitudes towards those people is like a Christmas present for Palestinian dictator Mahmoud Abbas. Because American president Barack Obama marked those Jews as valid targets of hatred, Abbas felt free to avoid negotiations entirely, which he never wanted to begin with. Furthermore, by marking those Jews as legitimate targets of hatred, Barack Obama helps lay the groundwork for violence against them.

That is surely not his intention, merely his effect.

The Fogel family was slaughtered by Jihadis who have a principled, and entirely racist, belief that Jews must not have sovereignty on Jewish land. This belief is perpetually bolstered by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. That much is to be expected. Hamas believes in the genocide of the Jews, as expressed in their charter. The PA, which morphed out of the PLO, merely believes in the destruction of the Jewish state. We expect them to teach their children to despise the Jews because that is precisely what their forbears have been doing for fourteen centuries.

For fourteen centuries the Jews of the Middle East have lived as an oppressed minority under Sharia as dhimmis. And while dhimmitude was not quite so horrific as African-American slavery, or what we Jews endured under Chistrendom during the Middle Ages, it was certainly bad enough.

As journalist Adi Schwartz writes in Azure:

As non-Muslim subjects of the Muslim state, Jews were assigned the inferior status of dhimmi (“dependent”). This position ensured the protection of their lives and property, the right to practice their religion, and a degree of internal communal autonomy. In exchange for all these, however, the Jews were required to submit to various forms of legal and social discrimination.11


There is no shortage of historical examples of this approach: In the fourteenth century, the Jews of Egypt and Syria were prohibited from living in tall buildings, raising their voices in prayer, burying their dead in graves more impressive than those of their Muslim neighbors, or filling clerical roles. If they wished to enter a public bathhouse, they had to hang a bell or copper coin around their necks.12 Until 1912, the Jews of Morocco were forced to walk barefoot or wear straw shoes outside the Jewish quarter as a sign of respect for the Arab nation.13 And the Shi’ite law introduced in Yemen by Zaydi imams determined that a Muslim who murdered a Jew should not be sentenced to death. Jews were obligated, moreover, to wear simple-looking clothes and to refrain from donning a headdress. And if this were not enough, many Jewish orphans were abducted by Yemen’s authorities and forced to convert.14

Then, as now, there were also restrictions on where Jews should be allowed to live and it is for this reason that Obama's restrictions on Jewish living space is so galling. Just because Jewish people happen to live and build housing for themselves on land where Jews originally came from, it does not automatically follow that Mahmoud Abbas cannot sit down in a room with Benjamin Netanyahu and draw a line on a map.

All Obama is doing, and all Obama's followers are doing when they spit their hatred at Jews who are living in the wrong place, is validate Palestinian anti-Semitism.  Dictator Abbas and his ministers have claimed that any future state of Palestine must be Judenrein. This would make it among the only states in world history, along with Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Nazi Germany, to have such a policy and the Obama administration validates such a stance when he insists that Jews must not be allowed to live, and thus build housing for themselves, on historically Jewish land.

The pure stupidity of it is awe-inspiring.