Barry Shaw – JStreet Lost
What we witness with JStreet has been the outside influence of radicals on impressionable young Jewish minds who instill into them the perception of resentful Arabs as victims’ worthy of their compassion.
The result is the JStreet promotion of the Palestinian cause couched failingly in seemingly pro-Israel terms. The confusion of this message is lost on Israelis living under the dark cloud of Palestinian reality.
To JStreet, it is in Israel’s best interests to surrender the bedrock of Jewish belonging and heritage for a greater good. They really believe this dangerous delusion, a delusion not based on any evidence or fact.
On a spiritual level, JStreet has not come to terms with the belief that we do not own the land. The land owns us. It has been our eternal duty to nurture this land since biblical days. Not to give it away on a whim or impulse of some greater good.
The JStreet message may be addressed to “Dear Israel,” but their appeal brings with it haunting Jewish echoes that fellow Jews must pack up all their possessions and withdraw into a ghetto to avoid the wrath of the Jew killers.
If JStreet really cares for Israel one would expect them to make demands of Hamas and PLO Fatah to convince them to drop their anti-Israel enmity in the cause of peace. Or persuade them to common sense that a Palestinian state is not possible without them agreeing to live in peace alongside the Jewish state. They don’t because they know they are incapable of moving the enemy out of their intransigent Jew-hating position.
Why should our enemy move out of their ancient vitriol? In their culture, historically, Jews and Christians were second class citizens, if tolerated at all.
So how can a young American Jew make any impression on them? Impossible. And JStreet knows it to be true, yet does nothing about this gap in their advocacy.
Better to put pressure on Israelis to make the concessions. Better instead to move the Jews.
How arrogant of them. And how thoughtless.
What they fail to comprehend in their well-meaning (?) innocence is that their comrades, the Arabs living in a dueling Palestinian power bloc divided against itself, have been indoctrinated not to create an undefined statehood (don’t be fooled by a two-state fallacy on ’67 lines) next to the Jewish homeland but to an unrelenting obsession to struggle against a “racist” (read “Jewish”) presence anywhere on “Palestinian” (read “Israeli”) land.
Let’s not be fooled, as JStreet clearly has been. This radicalism is deep and widespread. It infects the Arab street not only in territory granted by Israel to a double-headed Palestinian control in Ramallah and in Gaza City. It is also heard on the streets of Egypt and Jordan who, although both have signed peace agreements with Israel, have done little to re-educate and condition their people to peace with the Jews, or to recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish State that they were obligated to do under the terms of their agreements with Israel. Rather, the leaders allow this festering hate to bubble.
In order to distract their people, Arab leaders keep the pot boiling, allowing the pot to boil over and scald the neighboring Jew rather than have the mob turn against their corrupt failures.
The religious hatred of Jews has metastasized into an anti-Semitic Arab nationalism with Islamic tentacles to a wider Muslim world that further purifies their violent hate.
And now they can point to external support of idiot groups like JStreet to tell their people,
“You see, even the Jews support our cause.”
A simple demand would be that JStreet stop supporting those affiliated with and promoting terrorists and terrorism.
There is no moral imperative for Jewish groups to be pushing the agenda of the killers of Jews.
One would have thought that Jewish youth in the Diaspora would embrace their Jewish brethren in Israel rather than line up against them in such a harmful and hurtful manner. It is beyond the pale for JStreet to be a constant critic and thorn in the side of Israel, giving comfort to those who want to see us gone. This is morally reprehensible.
Worse still, following the amazing success of the Zionism that attracted in its wake hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Muslims from far off lands to work, envy and covet the Jewish enterprise, these migrants now consider it demeaning be placed in an inferior position in which Jews are willing to assist them to rise out of their economic and political straitjacket, even to grant them statehood. Better instead to find pride in countering and defeating Jewish ambition out of a sense of justice and victimhood. And so the downward spiral continues.
JStreet never took on board that the Arabs really don’t want our peace proposals. They don’t want our concessions. They want us destroyed.
Because JStreet could not get their head around this irremovable fact, they became redundant as a force for peace.
As a Jewish group, they were heartless in not appreciating the constant Israeli condition of survival under the shadow of annihilation. It has something to do with our history. It is always there.
One would think that the conscience of the world, particularly the conscience of a Jewish world, would place this Jewish psyche front and center. But it didn’t with JStreet or Yachad in the UK. They see the Jewish State as the obstacle.
So here we are again, more insistent than before that we will not allow ourselves to be forced out of our homes and to our own death. One would think that a Jewish group would come to our support. Instead, JStreet and Yachad are pandering to our enemy. Have they no shame?
JStreet fosters the unripe morality of a fruit that has fallen from a rotten tree.
It lost touch with reality. It failed to see the sober reality of a tiny Jewish state in a barren desert of burning hate and turmoil.
The ancient attacks of thieves and bandits have today become an organized and financed terror campaign using anything at hand from knives to rockets to kill Jews. But you wouldn’t know this from the JStreet narrative. The Arabs do this, they say, out of desperation. True. They are desperate to take what belongs to us, as they have for a hundred years and more.
It’s easier to rob and kill us than to innovate and produce. That is what divides us and prevents peace. It is a truth that JStreet never accepted. It was never found in the ledger of JStreet’s moral accountancy.
Little do they know that if they walked a mile in our shoes they would end up with painful and bloody feet.
Our struggle to avoid death, the success of our achievements, have made us an indefatigable people. The New Jew. Not the flaccid Jew.
There is an urgency in our striving. It is as if we are in a race against the world. A race that began three thousand years ago. And JStreet is part of the world that rebels against us.
We ignore the tribunal of world opinion. Those that loudly lecture us only urge us on. They make our merciless problems lighter to bear. They give us purpose to press on.
Their cajoling has a reverse effect. It makes us more determined in our goal. It forces us to be more efficient and productive in our efforts. We avoid defeat in battle by innovations that ends up improving the world.
They pursue a goal of defeating Zionism, but they inject a spark in us that lights the universe.
Those that escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe gave us our productivity and drive. Those that survived the Shoah gave us our spine and muscle. Those that defied the Soviets added to our scientific brain. Those forced out of Muslim lands gave us our spirit.
Addled youth in support of our killers make us bleed but little else. To us, they lack Jewish awareness and no moral element.
In opposition to a Ben Ami-led JStreet, Bnei Ami, the brotherhood of Zionism, is forging a destiny that unites our past and our future.
They deny Jewish heritage and historical legitimacy but adopt leftist intellectual claptrap in support of Arab nationalism and hegemony while claiming they oppose colonialism and imperialism, whatever that means these days.
They claim to oppose occupation but support driving Jews out of their homes to allow an Arab-Muslim occupation of our God-given land.
Under Ben Ami they support left-wing anti-Semitism disguised as something else.
There is nothing even-handed in this struggle. If Arabs are suffering it is because of their corrupt leadership’s failure to deliver them the peace and prosperity they deserve.
The question remains. Which side of history do the Jewish youth of JStreet, the putative friends of Israel who are no friends at all, wish to be on? That of Ben Ami? Or that of Bnei Ami, the real heart and soul of the Jewish people.
It is with us, the Israeli Zionists, where the Revolutionary Generation resides, forging beyond the despots that surround us, the shining star that guides the way to a better future whenever our neighbors will be capable of dropping their rancid hatred, a hatred that has troubled the world for far too long.
We Jews accepted a historic, a biblical, challenge to be exceptional. We are delivering on that challenge. From our success we demand of our neighbors to rise up to the challenge, as we have done. Pick leaders who can give you a better future. It is achieved by forging the 21st Century, not by being trapped in the past. Look at our liberty and freedom and follow our lead.
We are one of the countries in a jaded world with a sense of purpose.
While we fight for life, our detractors, such as JStreet arrogantly weigh our sins.
Israel’s sovereignty is questioned as in no other country on the planet. They demand justice for the Palestinian but not for us. Nothing that we do will ever satisfy them. The angry thrust for justice and judgment fall on the collective Jew, never on our malevolent enemy that thirsts for our destruction. And these haters have recruited JStreet to sit on their jury against us.
We have a close knowledge of evil, and it is not us.
Are there any Arab intellectuals who disassociate themselves from the traditional religious and radical firebrands that whip up the street and the campus with their rhetoric of hate and rejection of the Jew in the Middle East? If there are any, they are a fearful and silent minority. Those that do speak up can be found in Israel. Arab intellectuals that agree with me are too frightened to remain where they are. For out of the street the next firebrand will emerge to harness old religious hatreds to a new rebellion. And so it goes on. A stalemate where liberal dreamers think they represent all that is liberating for a tradition that maintains a rigid dogma.
This clash solves nothing. It only increases the discord between two worlds leaving us isolated and in jeopardy. And so it goes on. The malevolent rejectionists must be weakened, no strengthened. Sometimes it is kind to be cruel. Isn’t it always thus in war to achieve peace? It was with Germany, with Japan, where only total victory led to peace? Appeasing the Third Reich as it marched from Poland to France would never have achieved peace. To think that appeasing a violent and rejectionist Palestine by scolding Israel will achieve peace is dangerous nonsense. Liberal, progressive, call JStreet what you want. It is an idiocy of a dangerous kind.
Israel, geopolitically, is a tiny state in the epicenter of a maelstrom of savage hostility.
In Israel staying alive is a cause for joy and optimism. Isn’t that always the Jewish psyche? They came to kill us. We won. Let’s celebrate.
There is something perverse about the adoration by Jews of the killers of Jews. For JStreet, it has become an obsession.
Feeding the beast, as JStreet does, has achieved nothing. It never will.
JStreet Lost.
Barry Shaw is the International Public Diplomacy Director at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.
He is the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS, and Anti-Semitism’ and the recent best seller ‘BDS for IDIOTS.’
