Timeless Truths For Each High Holiday Season

by Gerald A. Honigman

At a time when our older children witness–if not actually participate in–the vilification of Israel and Zionism inside and outside the classroom on the typical “Progressive” university (and even high school) campus, as we enter a new High Holy Day season, there are certain timeless and timely truths that must never be forgotten. Indeed, if one cares about these issues, it’s best to prepare starry-eyed, save the world/fight for the underdog, naive offspring before they fly the coop. Like the Passover Haggadah, they need to be recited and reviewed for each generation…

It seems like yesterday when the author was one of those above kids…

The difference? He ( I ) took it upon himself, with parental encouragement, to be involved and to learn lots about the Middle East before leaving the nest. Those were the years leading up to the June ’67 Six Day War.

Sadly, polls now increasingly show–at least in the Diaspora, though Israel certainly has such problems too–that not many (especially non-Orthodox) Jewish students (let alone others) care much about such things any more. Ditto for their parents. Neither do many of their religious leaders who say things like they care about Israel but insist that it be an increasingly indefensible zipper of a state. These acorns don’t fall far from their trees.

Not that those who do care were ever in the majority, but things are now lots more worrisome. Presently, many Jews even criticize the American leader, President Trump, for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving America’s embassy there. And who cares about their alleged and pointless reasoning given the reality of Palestinian Arab rejectionism of any Jewish State—regardless of size?

Most students are thus far more vulnerable with regards to the typical activist campus atmosphere, where anti-Israel Progressives, Arab/Muslim and Leftist students and faculty, and Jewish groups and Hillel Foundations–which are too often part of the problem, not the solution–form the onslaught which awaits them as they begin their higher indoctrination, er education.

Since I’m a firm believer in not having to reinvent the wheel, there are certain historical facts and perspectives that must be repeated and considered as often as necessary to counter the non-stop lies and assaults on Israel and Zionism that our kids (and others) will likely encounter. So, let’s begin and incorporate my previous writings into what I may decide to turn into a yearly reminder for new crops of students arriving on campus just around the time of the Jewish High Holy Days…

When is the last time you discovered a New York Times editorial calling for a state for some thirty-five to forty million truly stateless Kurds instead of one in favor of the folks who repeatedly demand that a 22nd Arab state be born at a minuscule Israel’s great imperilment?

When is the last time students heard a university professor speak out this way in between placing Israel and Zionism under the high power lens of moral scrutiny? When’s the last time there was a rally for Students for Justice in Kurdistan on campus as there are for groups like Students for Justice in Palestine?

Jews, on the other hand, can honestly say that they have repeatedly tried to reach honorable and just solutions to their problems with Arabs.

While wanting to put an end to their own perpetual nakba (as Arabs refer to the rebirth of Israel–”the catastrophe”), Jews nevertheless agreed to one compromise after another over the past century so that Arabs could gain their additional state (and second, not first, in “Palestine”… since 1922, Jordan sits on about 78% of the original 1920 Mandate).

That Arabs want their 22nd state to exist in place of Israel, not beside it, has always been the problem. Fatah’s and the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas–Israel’s alleged good cop “peace partners”—are on record telling Hamas (the bad cops) not to worry about recognizing a State of the Jews because he and his latter-day Arafatians-in-suits, who have called all dealings with Jews a Trojan Horse, have no intention to ever do so. The deliberate lies–taqiyya–they tell gullible dhimmis and Infidels in the West and elsewhere are far different from what their own folks hear in Arabic.

The issue goes far beyond a clash of Arab and Jewish (as in English, Irish, Polish, Swedish…”Jew”=Judean, as seen on the front cover on the Roman coin of conquest here) nationalisms and the supremacy of Islam. Indeed, it has always involved Arabs not granting anyone else (i.e., not only Jews) but themselves political and national rights in the region they simply call “purely Arab patrimony”–with the possible exception of some whom they Arabized and/or Islamized in centuries past.

While this holds true for Turks, Afghanis, Pakistanis and Iranians, for example, this is not the case for others like Kurds, black African (Muslim and non-Muslim) Sudanese, and Imazighen/”Berbers.” For the latter, the issue becomes more of a clash of native peoples resisting the conquest and forced Arabization process whereby even their own pre-Arab languages and cultures have been frequently outlawed.

This Arabization process is still under way centuries after Arabs burst out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E. and spread in numerous directions in their imperial conquests of the region.

While Arabs insist that Jews confess and address all of their alleged transgressions (at least they got the timing correct…Yom Kippur is fast approaching), Arabs see their own light years’ worse subjugation, massacres, enslavement, colonization, and settlement of other peoples and lands (including in the Mandate of Palestine, where most Arabs were newcomers themselves) simply in terms of their own just dues. And what’s worse is that too often most of the world at large, for a variety of reasons, has granted them a free pass. If Israel isn’t the alleged perpetrator of the evil, most others remain deaf, dumb, and blind to it…including the specialists in academia.

In terms of Arab-Israeli politics, Jews are continuously accused of countless sins. Yet, as is noted in terms of another major Jewish holiday, Passover, Jews consider it regrettable that any hardship at all has to be suffered by anyone–even enemies sworn to their own demise. Some caution is in order, however, regarding this, for even as they symbolically remove drops of wine from their cups at the Passover Seder dinner to diminish the joy of deliverance from bondage because Egyptians were killed, they must take care not to offer apologies for wanting to put an end to their own two thousand year-old nightmare. Pathetically, too many Jews so indulge.

The rebirth of Israel on about one quarter of one percent of the region represents the wish to finally put an end to the horrors of exile, slaughter, demonization, forced conversions, expulsions, autos-da-fe, ghettoization, pogroms, dehumanization, inquisitions, dhimmitude, and so forth–culminating in the Holocaust.

Jews became weary of being labeled either “killers of G-d” by the Christian West or kilab yahud (Jew Dogs) and “killers of Prophets” in the Muslim East–and treated accordingly. History finally forced them to do what was necessary for their own survival in their quest for a small slice of the relative justice pie, working, with G_d’s help, for the age-old prophetic resurrection of the Jewish State.

When discussing the Jews’ sometimes flawed struggles to rid themselves of their perpetual scapegoat, victim, and whipping post par excellence status, there is certainly no shortage of critics pointing out their imperfections.

Yet, Arabs and their supporters offer no Jewish High Holy Day-type confessions, do not seek to atone for, nor ask for forgiveness from G-d nor man for blowing up buses, restaurants, schools, and such–nor beheading infants, setting Israel ablaze, slitting the throats of children and parents in their sleep, etc. and so forth. On the contrary, they are declared heroes, and they and/or their families are given financial and other awards and commendations.

Indeed, the same Arabs and others who loudly proclaim Israel’s “original sin” show no signs of remorse for deliberately targeting innocents, conquering, subjugating, enslaving, and/or massacring literally millions of other native peoples–still going on to this very day. The estimates of their victims on the Indian subcontinent and points east alone are mind-boggling.

As the New Year 5785, begins, Jews, like all other peoples, certainly have a lot–both individually and collectively–to work on and to deal with in terms of both G_d and man. The latter will include continuing to try to find an honorable solution to problems involving Arabs. But to do this, Israel must have true partners for peace–ones who recognize the rights of Jews as well as their own, and understand that other peoples, besides Arabs, are also entitled to a share of justice in the region.

Unfortunately, such an improvement is not how Arabs are used to dealing with any of their own competitors. Furthermore, everything that most Arabs say, write, teach and preach to their own people–from pre-school days onwards–works against this ever happening.

Under such circumstances, no amount of Israeli concessions will ever be enough. Hence the folly of the Left’s wishful thinking. It’s no accident that most of my book’s Foreword was written by the President of the Kurdistan National Assembly of Syria, and some of the major jacket comments were penned by a North African Amazigh/”Berber” publisher. These two men alone represent some 70-80 million non-Arab peoples.

Until such a day arrives, however, Israel must do what it must do to thrive, not just survive. And one of the demands of this requires Israel to stand up firmly for its own just demands.

It was assured, after the renewed attempt on its life in June 1967, that it would never have to return to the suicidal armistice lines–not borders–imposed upon it in 1949, regardless of what any American President, perpetually hostile State Department, or others may threaten.

Before the United Nations decides to try to help create a 22nd Arab state (and second in the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine), Israel must insist on the UN honoring the final draft of its own earlier Security Council Resolution (242) from 1967 which promised Israel secure, defensible, and real borders to replace those fragile lines. A territorial compromise in the disputed territories–as Lord Caradon and all the other architects of 242 testify to–is thus a must, regardless of what Arabs and their supporters demand. And this, by the way, is mostly what the fuss is all about regarding the Settlement issue.

While this is not to say that all hope must be given up regarding a peaceful solution to the Arab-Israel conflict, it is to say that deceiving ourselves will only lead to even more serious problems ahead.

Of all of the real sins Jews must strike their chests, seek forgiveness, and atone for during this Holy season, they must remind themselves that the Prophetic, miraculous rebirth of Israel and their struggle to survive and live in dignity are not to be counted among them. Justice does not demand a 22 to 0 score in the age of nationalism between Arab and Jew… nor between Arabs and all of those other peoples as well.

By any reasonable and objective standard, any fair comparison of the Jews’ own imperfections in these regards with those of the very Arabs, Turks, and Iranians who take them to task on such issues is nauseatingly laughable.

May the year 5785 bring more harmony, empathy, and cooperation between all the peoples of the Middle East and the rest of the world as well.

L’Shanah Tovah Tekatevu … May you be inscribed (in the Book of Life) for a good year.