Barry Shaw – Jews who are leading us away from peace
I read, following Mike Pompeo’s declaration that Jews living in Judea & Samaria are not illegal, that Rabbi Rick Jacobs, who heads the American Reform Movement, disagrees with the US Secretary of State.
Perhaps inadvertently, Rabbi Jacobs is pushing the notion that it is fine for Muslims to live anywhere they like in the West Bank, and that Israel must give them even more options, but it is illegal for Jews to live in Judea & Samaria because this will get in the way of his vision for peace. This notion is inherently anti-Semitic. It rejects the essence of Judaism and its connection to the land.
Irrespective of how this strange dichotomy between Rabbi Jacobs and the Secretary of State arose, I would like to urge Rabbi Jacobs to find his way back to reality and truth, and to bring his congregation with him, for they have all surely lost their way and wandered innocently into dark places where Jews have no place to tread.
Rabbi Jacobs still promotes a two-state solution without being aware that this two-state solution is dead. It died years ago. It was killed by the Palestinians.
Years ago, Israelis were prepared to give peace with the Palestinians a chance. Not anymore. Israelis are realists. We experienced the evident truth of what the Palestinian are all about, and it is not peace. It is death. Dead Jews. Death to Israel.
Yet people like Rabbi Jacobs are still trying to drag this dead two-state camel through burning Palestinian sand toward a distant oasis, an oasis called “peace.” What they fail to realize, through their fevered brow that this is not an oasis but a fata morgana, a mirage of their own imagination. An image once shared by Israelis, but never shared by a corrupt, obsessively anti-Semitic, and rejectionist Palestinian leadership.
I have a message of hope for Rabbi Jacobs. There are solutions for peace, but they do not include a failed two-state non-solution. Get over it, Rabbi. Sit your week of Shiva for something that will never be, and join us in creating a better future for Jews and Arabs in the Middle East.
Simply put, peaceniks like Rabbi Jacobs have to realize they have become fixated on a solution that both camps of the Palestinian political divide have no intention of achieving. How many more warning signs have to be waved in front of their non-seeing eyes before they get real.
The Palestinians have no intention, ever, of living in peace alongside the Jewish State of Israel.
Not the corrupt kleptocracy of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. Not Hamas in the Gaza Strip, that is poised to usurp power in the West Bank as soon as Israel takes its hand off the security arrangements. Not Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an Iranian proxy that successfully launched over 400 rockets into Israeli civilian centers recently.
Yet Rabbi Rick Jacobs continues to blame the Jews for the ills of a vengeful Palestinian society.
To Rabbi Jacobs, it is the Jew living in Ariel that is causing Palestinians to go hunting for vulnerable Jews to kill. It is the Jew in Efrat that causes the imams, the Palestinian teachers, the political inciters to inflame their people to kill Jews and to destroy the “Zionist entity.”
If only the Jew will get out of the way, says Rabbi Jacobs, we will have peace.
Which leads me to ask. Is this rabbi Jewish? Is there anything about his brand of Judaism that feels a connection to the biblical call to honor and defend the land?
On which land, rabbi, will you make your final stand?
We all want peace, rabbi, but we will not get it by surrendering to the demands of our enemy and incrementally giving them more and more of our G-d-given land.
How much more shall we give, rabbi? To 1967 lines, where Hamas terrorists will be looking down onto Ben Gurion Airport and Tel Aviv lying in the lowland below their feet? To seventy yards from the main north-south arterial highway that borders Tulkarm, where Hamas suicide bombers came to blow us up at Pesach as we prayed in the Park Hotel? As we bought our groceries in our local shuk? As my wife went to meet a friend in the main shopping mall where two suicide bombers were waiting? How much more land, rabbi? How much more before you realize you were wrong with your two-state fantasy, a fantasy that leaves us dead?
Did you applaud when Arik Sharon pulled nine thousand Jews out of the Gaza Strip? Are you happy now that Hamas and Islamic Jihad are stockpiling more deadly rockets and missiles?
Think rabbi. Think! Maybe you can join us in planning a better future for Jew and Arabs. One that begins by realizing that, to achieve it, we have to knock the props out of a dysfunctional Palestinian leadership. That we first need to dismantle the Palestinian political infrastructure that has become a violent monster, not a peace-partner.
Just as peace was only achieved to end World War Two by totally destroying Germany and Japan in order to kill the obsessional enemy ideology by both warring regimes, so we have to mount a total victory campaign to eradicate the cause of fifty years of hopelessness, namely the obsessional anti-Semitic ideology of our twin-headed Palestinian political-terror enemy and replace it with technocrats, businessmen and leaders who really do want peace and prosperity.
First remove the rotten infrastructure that has caused so much grief, injury and death without which a better future cannot take root.
Even the anticipated Trump economic plan will not work without this painful, but essential, first step, rabbi.
If the Palestinians end up with less than a state so be it. They lost the right, if ever they had it, to a fully-fledged state after fifty years of terror. Maybe they should start thinking of an Arab confederacy. It worked for the United Arab Emirates.
Ideas, rabbi. Fresh ideas. Think out of the box, because your old ideas are dead.
Those who forgot the errors of the past are those who are carrying these errors on their backs today. They are the international diplomatic world, impotent to reform their ideas. Stuck in a fifty-year-old mantra that is not working.
They are the professional radical anti-Semites and Israel haters who are convincing their masters to ignore Palestinian crimes and abuses and solely punish Israel.
They are well-meaning but sadly mistaken people like Rabbi Jacobs, J-Street, Jewish Voices for Palestine, who got lost in the hate-filled woods and who need to find their GPS and return to their Jewish roots.
Basically, they are pushing a world without Israel.
They are dooming us to repeat those errors. And we will never achieve peace.
Barry Shaw is an affirmative and unapologetic Zionist. He is also the International Public Diplomacy Director at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. He is also the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism.’
