Category: Israel

Israel is the only Jewish State in the World

Israel celebrated 73 years of independence 14 April 2021

After World War II modern Israel came into existence on 14 May 1948 as the homeland for the Jewish people. It was also defined in its declaration of independence as a “Jewish state,” a term that appeared in the United Nations partition decision of 1947 as well. From the very beginning Arab nations opposed the idea of the Jewish state.

The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement was issued on  August 18, 1988. The Islamic Resistance Movement, also known as the HAMAS, is an extremist fundamentalist Islamic organization operating in the territories under Israeli control. Its Covenant is a  comprehensive manifesto comprised of 36 separate articles, all of which promote the basic HAMAS goal of destroying the State of Israel through Jihad(Islamic Holy War).

So the question is how should Israel respond to the constant attacks of rockets and other arms that has happened repeatedly since HAMAS was created.?  It is a fact that Israel has overwhelming military power compared to HAMAS.  Making nice to an enemy whose soul purpose is to destroy you leaves the victim of the attacks no choice but to shoot back.  That is what Israel has done every time there has been incoming fire.

Calls for a two state solution are pointless if HAMAS and other terrorist groups have there goal as the destruction of Israel.  Israel’s Jewish population is 6.7 million people and is about 75% of the total Israeli population. 

What is a proportional response when your enemy wants to kill you?  

I hate Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu

I am Jewish but not a Zionist. I grew up in Philadelphia. During the Vietnam War I was stationed in Thailand. I was in the Air Force working in a supply station. My father and his brother both fought in World War II. So our family is loyal to this country. As best as I can determine everyone in my family is a Democrat.

The State of Israel was recognized by Democratic President Harry Truman in 1948. Democratic President John F. Kennedy in 1962 sold Israel a major weapon system, the Hawk anti-aircraft missile.

Tropes questioning the loyalty of Jews has been a historic reality. It wasn’t just Hitler and the Nazis. Jews in the Jewish Diaspora were accused of dual loyalty by the Romans in the 1st century.

Donald Trump’s accusations against American Jews is just another example of the same anti-Semitic words of others who hate Jews for no other reason than they need a foil or fear of everyone who is not a white Christian.

Benjamin Netenyahu played into Donald Trump’s hands for political reasons. His decision to bar two congresswomen from Israel will harm American Jews. For me, Israel is no friend to American Jews or Jews anywhere else in the world. The crowd that chanted “Jews will not replace us” at a neo-Nazis rallying in Charlottesville, Virginia now have one more reason to parade and attack Jews.

David Bancroft

The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel

Provisional Government of Israel

Official Gazette: Number 1; Tel Aviv, 5 Iyar 5708, 14.5.1948 Page 1

The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel

The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses. Pioneers, defiant returnees, and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country’s inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.

This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of the 2nd November, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home.

The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people – the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the community of nations.

Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.

On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.

Accordingly we, members of the People’s Council, representatives of the Jewish Community of Eretz-Israel and of the Zionist Movement, are here assembled on the day of the termination of the British Mandate over Eretz-Israel and, by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.

We declare that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (15th May, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People’s Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People’s Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called “Israel.”
The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

The State of Israel is prepared to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of the 29th November, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of Eretz-Israel.

We appeal to the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building-up of its State and to receive the State of Israel into the community of nations.

We appeal – in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months – to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

We extend our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

We appeal to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream – the redemption of Israel.

Placing our trust in the Almighty, we affix our signatures to this proclamation at this session of the provisional Council of State, on the soil of the Homeland, in the city of Tel-Aviv, on this Sabbath eve, the 5th day of Iyar, 5708 (14th May, 1948).

David Ben-Gurion

Daniel Auster Mordekhai Bentov Yitzchak Ben Zvi Eliyahu Berligne Fritz Bernstein Rabbi Wolf Gold Meir Grabovsky Yitzchak Gruenbaum Dr. Abraham Granovsky Eliyahu Dobkin Meir Wilner-Kovner Zerach Wahrhaftig Herzl Vardi Rachel Cohen Rabbi Kalman Kahana Saadia Kobashi Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Levin Meir David Loewenstein Zvi Luria Golda Myerson Nachum Nir Zvi Segal Rabbi Yehuda Leib Hacohen Fishman David Zvi Pinkas Aharon Zisling Moshe Kolodny Eliezer Kaplan Abraham Katznelson Felix Rosenblueth David Remez Berl Repetur Mordekhai Shattner Ben Zion Sternberg Bekhor Shitreet Moshe Shapira Moshe Shertok

This is Chutzpah! This is Hypocrisy!

If you don’t know the meaning of the word you will have to Google it.

From Dana Milbank’s column March 26, 2019 in the Washington Post. He attended the AIPC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) conference in Washington, D.C.

On Monday, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) literally read from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” on the House floor and borrowed Hitler’s “big lie” allegation against Jews to use on Democrats. “Unconscionable,” said the Anti-Defamation League. But Republicans, and Netanyahu, said nothing.

Tuesday was the 40th anniversary of the signing of the historic Camp David Accords. But the Israeli leader didn’t mention this, either, instead delivering division to a group that has embraced his (and Trump’s) nationalist policies.

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest branch of American Judaism, noticed that the AIPAC crowd had “beyond a doubt” become mostly pro-Trump conservatives, not the cross section of Israel supporters that AIPAC once drew. The rhetoric fit the room. “To suggest anti-Semitism is part of the Democratic Party and liberal part of the spectrum and not also part of Republican leaders’ discourse .

The thing that has kept Israel safe over the decades is rock-solid bipartisan support.

Consider the hypocrisy:
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) issued (then deleted) a tweet targeting three wealthy Jews: “We cannot allow [George] Soros, [Tom] Steyer and [Michael R.] Bloomberg to BUY this election! But at AIPAC, McCarthy denounced anti-Semitic language on the “floors of Congress” — an apparent reference to Omar — and said he’d be “lying” to say Democrats are as opposed to anti-Semitism as Republicans.

Vice President Pence once declared that “I know of no synagogues in my district” (there were two) and, after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, attended a memorial with a Jews-for-Jesus Christian rabbi. But at AIPAC, he said Democrats have “been co-opted by people who promote rank anti-Semitic rhetoric.”

President Trump, of course, said there “were very fine people” among the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, told Jews they wouldn’t support him “because I don’t want your money,” tweeted an image of a Star of David atop a pile of cash, used anti-Semitic tropes in an ad with photos of prominent Jews, and often denounces “globalists” such as Soros — among many other offenses. But he calls the Democrats “anti-Jewish.”

And here at AIPAC, his appointees attacked Democrats. “We will not do this for the Benjamins,” David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, said, informing the crowd that Trump “deserves” an extended ovation.

Rivlin

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin came to the Jewish Federations’ General Assembly in Los Angeles to plead for Jewish unity. He harped on Israel’s growth, its innovations, and its place as a home for all Jews. Emphasising that we can do everything better if we do it together.

President Rivlin lamented the Western Wall’s transformation into “a symbol of division and disagreement” between Israel and the Diaspora, and expressed hope that understandings would soon be reached on egalitarian prayer at the holy site.

For those of you who have not been following the issue, the question is about prayers at the Western (or wailing) Wall in Jerusalem. Women are kept separate from men and they cannot pray together. The issue has become a symbol of the difference in religious beliefs of Israelis versus most Jews spread throughout the world (Diaspora).

The problem, as I see it, is that Israel is controlled by the ultra-orthodox who are a political party. Apparently it is a party that has enough voters that can sway the governing of their country. Of course, as in any democratic country, they are free to choose the kind of society they live in. It just is not the kind social order that most American and Canadian Jews want.

North American Jews believe in a social order that is an anathema to the religious people of Israel.

Reuven Rivlin’s purpose in making this speech was his plea for North American Jewish support. It is all about money and political support. After all Israel does not have many friends. The loss of North American Jews would be significant.

Rivlin’s plea did not come with any offers of inclusion of North American Jews. Both American and Canadian Jews are obviously happy with their lives. Is there a reason North American Jews should treat Israel any differently than Americans of Italian decent should treat Italy or those of Irish decent should view Ireland?

As a child I accompanied my grandmother to Saturday morning services.  I was either eight or nine years old.  To my dismay we sat on a mezzanine. Women were required to sit separately from the men and were excluded from the ceremony.  Even at that age I concluded that orthodox Judaism was living in a medieval past. Sorry Grandma.

Why there is No Peace between Israelis and Palestinians

This posting is motivated by the United Nations Security Council condemnation of Israel’s decision to build new housing in Israel occupied West Bank.

The story is old but people reading this blog need to understand how Israelis and Palestinians have come to this sorry place in history.  This is not a complete history of all the wars fought between Arabs and Israel. Nor is there any reference to Hamas and Hezbollah in this discussion, who are both sworn enemies of Israel.

  • When the state of Israel was created by an action of the United Nations in 1948 the Arab population in that area refused to recognize the creation of a Jewish state. Immediately after Israel declared itself a state the surrounding nations attacked.  Arabs lost that war.
  • In 1967 the Arab nations surrounding Israel gathered armies on the borders of Israel in preparation to invade. Those countries were Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.  The Israelis actually started the war before the Arab countries attacked.  Israel won that war driving the Syrians out of the immediately adjoining area, pushing the Jordanians to the east of the Jordan River and taking all of the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and occupying all the land of Egypt to the Suez Canal.  In the process Israel also occupied parts of southern Lebanon.
  • Israel reached an agreement with Egypt to withdraw from all of the land they had won in the 1967 War in exchange for Egyptian recognition of the State of Israel. The Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty was signed in Washington, D.C., United States on 26 March 1979, following the 1978 Camp David Accords.
  • The Jordan-Israel Peace Treaty was signed on October 26, 1994, at the southern border crossing of Wadi ‘Araba. The treaty guaranteed Jordan the restoration of its occupied land (approximately 380 square kilometers), as well as an equitable share of water from the Yarmouk and Jordan rivers. Moreover, the treaty defined Jordan’s western borders clearly and conclusively for the first time.
  • Israel remains in control of what was part of Jordan, the area west of the Jordan River, and Gaza, a small strip of land along the Mediterranean Sea that had previously been controlled by Egypt, and the Golan Heights that were previously part of Syria.
  • Israel withdrew its settlements in Gaza in 2005. That amounted to about 8,500 people being relocated in the hopes of bringing some peace to that area. Repeated missile attacks from Gaza into Israel’s pre-1967 territory has resulted in repeated bombing of the area by the Israeli Defense forces.  The most recent bombing occurred in 2014.
  • Efforts to create a two state solution between Israel and the occupied Arab territories have been unsuccessful primarily because the leadership of the Palestinians refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist.
  • Israelis take the position that the spoils of war is they get to decide what happens in the areas they occupy. Thus building Jewish communities in areas that are primarily Palestinians is a fair consequence of the wars they have won.  The rest of the world through the United Nations disagrees.
  • Neither Israelis nor Palestinians trust their opponents to honor their words.

Hatred makes a peace agreement an unlikely outcome in the next few years.  New leadership for both Israel and the Palestinians is the only hope for a settlement and permanent peace.

Happy New Year

David Bancroft

The Future of Jews in America

Historically, when a country has economic issues the leadership frequently blames the Jewish population.  It is a convenient scape goat that is usually a small part of the total population.

‘Hail Trump’: That’s how a group of white nationalists saluted the November 8 victory of the president-elect this weekend at the annual conference of the National Policy Institute, as seen in an exclusive video filmed by The Atlantic. The disturbing scene came during an after-dinner speech by alt-right leader Richard Spencer, who among other anti-Semitic and racist statements described America as “a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity.” His audience cheered, and many raised their arms in Nazi salutes. Trump has not endorsed these statements, of course, nor has he asked white nationalist groups for their support. But the sentiment is alarming.

Meanwhile Congressman Keith Ellison is the leading candidate to head Democratic National Committee.  A growing number of pro-Israel activists and Jewish community figures are expressing concern that Minnesota’s U.S. Rep. Ellison will turn the Democratic Party away from Israel if he is elected party chairman.

While I am not a Zionist I do appreciate the fact that Israel is the only majority Jewish nation in the world.  “Hail Trump” frightens me and so does a congressman who has a history of relations with Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam movement. The Jewish News Service reports on Ellison’s relationship with Farrakhan in detail.

My family thinks I am too involved with politics and my fears are unfounded.  Sadly history seems to support my fears.

Are boycotts against Israel anti-Semitism or free speech?

Free speech in America means saying what you want to say no matter who is offended.  That translates to the KKK and other extremist groups having the right to hold rallies in public places.  That results in demonstrations in big cities by groups wanting to express their demands or frustrations.

Thus the above question posted on KPCC, the large audience NPR, FM station, in Los Angeles.  following is their explanation of a proposed law in the California legislature.  Although the intent might be pleasing to some people, the proposed law strikes me as unconstitutional.  At the end of the article on KPCC’s web site there were comments both for and against the law.

—
A California state bill that would punish companies participating in the boycott, divestment, and sanction (BDS) movement against Israel recently passed the California state Senate Judiciary Committee.

The controversial movement calls on individuals and companies to boycott Israel until it ends occupying “all Arab lands.” Rather than punish boycotts directly, AB 2844 targets “violations of existing anti-discrimination laws that take place under the pretext of a boycott or other ‘policy’ aimed at ‘any sovereign nation or people recognized by the government of the United States, including, but not limited to, the nation and people of Israel,’” according to a Los Angeles Times editorial. It also requires those seeking state government contracts to certify that they haven’t engaged in discrimination through such a policy.

There is disagreement about the strength of the current bill, as language directly referencing BDS has been removed in favor of more general assertions that reference the existing Unruh Civil Rights Act and California Fair Employment and Housing Act.

This has not mitigated the controversy surrounding the legislation.

Proponents of the bill seek to portray the BDS movement as anti-Semitic. Dillon Hosier, senior political adviser for the nonprofit advocacy organization Israeli-American Nexus, said that it has created an insidious anti-Jewish environment across California.

“Californians are being targeted who have zero connection to the government of Israel,” Hosier said. “What BDS has become is not ‘boycott, divestment and sanctions,’ [but rather] ‘bigotry, discrimination and anti-Semitism.’”

Opponents of the legislation argue the bill violates the First Amendment.

Estee Chandler is a founding member of the Los Angeles Chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that seeks to end Israel’s presence in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. She finds the California legislature’s actions against BDS  “deeply troubling,” saying she sees what the Legislature is doing as punishing political speech.

“From the start, AB 2844 was introduced to single out, stigmatize and suppress the political speech of Californians who criticized … Israeli and U.S. policies,” Chandler said. “Denying state business to an otherwise qualified contractor based solely on their views about Israel and their participation in a legal boycott … goes beyond government exercising its speech, and it impedes on our constitutional rights.”

AB 2844 passed an initial vote in the Assembly, and last week it passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee. Next, it heads to a vote in the Appropriations Committee in early August.

Assembly Bill 2844

Bernie Sanders: If you don’t like Israel don’t ask me for money!

Mr. Sanders:

You continually send me e-mails asking me to send you money so that you can be elected to be the President of the United States.

I am Jewish and I fear for the safety and future of Jews in the world, especially when Iran is launching missiles – dedicating to the eradication of the State of Israel.

I will not vote for you because I believe that you do not know the difference between good and evil.  You have spokespeople, like Linda Sarsour, who decry the State of Israel and liken it to white supremacists and say that it is an apartheid state.

 After the Germans, Arabs and Japanese conspired to conquer the world and wipe out every Jew in the world in World War 2, the world (at the U.N.) voted to divide Palestine into Arab-land and Jew-land (this was after Great Britain gave 80% of Palestine to Jordan in 1922).

Israel agreed to accept the “partition” plan and the Arabs refused, claiming that they wanted 100% of the land – that the Jews could live in the Mediterranean.  After the war of 1948, the borders were fixed; except that the Arabs again refused to honor those borders or acknowledge that the Jews had any right to live anywhere.

In 1967, the Arabs launched another offensive against Israel.  Israel won that war too.   Israel ended up with more territory.  They gave most of the “gains” back to Egypt in order to make peace with Egypt.

They offered to give the “West Bank” back to Jordan to make peace, but Jordan refused to take it – because Jordan hates the Palestinians (the Jordanians have kept the Palestinians in camps for the past 60 years – rather than accept them as Jordanian citizens).

Israel kept, accepted and made citizens of the Israeli Arabs.  I’m sure that you know that 20% of Israelis are Arabs …. and 20% of Israeli medical students are Arabs.  Did you know that the new assistant head of the Police is an Arab (named yesterday)?

Your outrageous lying statement that the Israelis overreacted in the Gaza conflict is immoral.  No fighting army (against Hamas terrorists who use human shields and launch missiles from schools and mosques) has EVER acted with such restraint and morality as the Israeli’s.

Shame on you Bernie that you cannot tell good from bad; morality from evil.  You are turning your back on the only democracy in the Middle East.  You are turning your back on the country that is the nicest and best place for Palestinians to live (Syria, Lebanon and Jordan have them locked up in camps).  You support those whose motto is “From the River to the Sea” (meaning that ALL of Israel should be Arab … and the Jews should live in the Sea).  You just don’t understand the real world.  You have bought into Arab propaganda and turned against the only Jewish country in the world.

written by Michael Waterman, teacher at Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles