The Jewish Demonization of Jews Who Live on the "West Bank"

Michael

One of the saddest aspects of pro-Israel advocacy among Jewish "progressives" is in the demonization of Jewish people who live on the ancient Jewish land recently dubbed by Jordan "the West Bank." That small area of land, directly adjacent to the state of Israel and known until quite recently as Judea and Samaria has been home to Jewish people for something like four thousand years.

For as long as there has been the Jewish people, so we have lived on that land. I understand, of course, that well-meaning liberals, such as myself, would prefer to see the Jewish state of Israel living in peace next to a Palestinian state that would mainly comprise that land. I have no problem with that. If the Jewish people are so gracious that we wish to share Jewish land with the Palestinian Arabs in order to bring about a harmonious two state solution, then I am all in favor. I want the two-state solution. The problem is, of course, that traditional Arab anti-Semitism insists that any future state of Palestine must be Judenrein and that the Palestinian leadership cannot negotiate an end to hostilities with Israel until the Jews stop building housing for themselves in Judea.

The fundamental basis of Arab grievances in this regard is purely racist. In fact, the fundamental basis of the entire conflict is Koranic hatred for the Jewish people within the Islamic scheme of things. This is why Mahmoud Abbas will not negotiate an end to hostilities with the Jewish people of the Middle East. The very idea of Jewish sovereignty on land that was once ruled over by the Umma is anathema to much of the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Sadly enough, Barack Obama and much of the Jewish left validates Arab race hatred toward Jews by essentially agreeing with Mahmoud Abbas that Jewish people must not build housing for themselves on historically Jewish land. Consequently those who do so, such as the Fogel family that was slaughtered by Jihadis last year, including the chopping off of the head of a three month old baby girl, are regularly defamed by other Jews.

As the pro-Israel Italian journalist, Giulio Meotti, writes in a piece about the Fogels entitled "Remembering the Massacre":

These citizens have been called “leeches,” “snakes,” “vicious,” “primitives,” “medieval,” “obscurantists,” “corrupt” and “parasites.” They are the target for the arrows of Israel haters, both domestic and foreign.

The media paint them as being separate from Klal Yisrael. Their villages are branded “illegal” and in the end they find that they themselves have become “illegal beings.” Pariahs. Vilified as a needless burdens on the defense budget. They have been chosen as Israel’s scapegoats, the ever-guilty, the Jewish state’s Jews.

If I could go back in time to the 1970s, I would advise the Israeli government not to encourage building in Judea and Samaria because doing so will give the local Arab leadership an excuse not to negotiate an end to hostilities. But it is too late now. There are something like 400,000 to 500,000 Jewish people living in Judea and Samaria and short of a civil war, or the actual declaration of a Palestinian state, those people are not going anywhere. Thus, the perpetual whining about their presence is entirely counterproductive. What the Israeli government needs to do is simply declare their final borders, borders that would incorporate most of those Jews into Israel, and be done with it.

Israel should be the first country on the planet to welcome the state of Palestine to the family of nations and thus declare the conflict over with. What we should not be doing, as the Obama administration and its supporters have done, is demonize Jews who live beyond the "green line" because this does nothing but validate Arab racism against us, which leads to the kind of Jihadi violence that we saw leveled at the Fogel family.  It justifies a continuation of racist Arab violence against those of us who choose to live there.

I highly recommend against.