Jews, never give up!

by Phyllis Chesler

It is not the best of times. It may actually be the worst of times.

While half of Israel continues to demonstrate in the streets against their own government, Iran is building an airport in Lebanon that is only 13 miles away from Israel’s northern border. President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama’s hirelings have tied Israel’s hands so it cannot preempt the construction of such a dangerous, Hezbollah-controlled airport. At the same time, the Biden administration has just given Iran $6 billion in exchange for hostages.

This is sold as a merciful decision, but it is also a craven and strategically disastrous one.

At the same time, the propaganda war against Israel is now breaking through the front doors and windows of every Western university. More and more academics and public intellectuals are signing letters against “apartheid” Israel. Professional associations are sponsoring panels with speakers who specialize in the most deranged lies about the Jewish state. Jewish students are being harassed.

Visible Jews around the world, including in North America and Europe, are being physically attacked and even murdered. Cemeteries and synagogues are being defaced. Psychoanalysts, or at least one division of the American Psychological Association, have hijacked the “Jewish science” founded by Freud and seek to pervert it into pro-Palestinian indoctrination.

As I’ve written before, we have lost this round of the cognitive war.

But when faced with the prospect of joining World II on Britain’s side, despite Britain’s “White Paper” restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine, Ben Gurion famously said, “We shall fight the war as if there was no White Paper and the White Paper as if there was no war.”

Thus, we must fight (or support) the terrifying civil war in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as if there are no external threats and we must fight the external threats as if our brethren, however well intentioned, are not attempting to overthrow the government in a very ugly left-wing American style.

Given that we are about to observe Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; given that God has granted us this last year and may grant us yet another year on Earth; given that one must search for and find a necessary perspective, I offer this:

Just as our honorable ancestors kept draining the swamps in the Holy Land, just as they endured countless Arab attacks and then countless “Palestinian” terrorist attacks, so too must we continue to fight Iran even though America seems to have tied one, if not both, hands behind Israel’s back. And we must continue fighting the lethal lies against Israel in every possible way and in every forum we possess.

We cannot stop. We can never give up.

As the late, great Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote: “No people has believed as lucidly or as long as have Jews that life has a purpose. … That we are … capable of shaping our lives in accordance with our highest ideals. We are here for a reason. … God always gives us the chance and the power to begin again. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the holiest days of a holy people, God summons us to greatness.”

May we continue to rise to the occasion.

First published in JNS Daily.