RUTHFULLY YOURS

Are there any Jewish players on teams in any Moslem/Arab nation ? Sounds nice and lofty but the only team sport Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIs know is team Jihad…..rsk
Mr. Fahoum is a graduate of Columbia University’s master’s program in negotiation and conflict resolution.

Tennis changed my life. Growing up as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, I struggled with an identity crisis, feeling caught between two worlds. But when I was 8, I started playing tennis in Haifa. Eventually I became the first Arab Muslim on the Israeli junior national team, representing the country in European and world championships.

This was a personal success. More important, though, it gave me a platform for building bonds with Jewish youth. The tennis court was an island where everyone felt like they belonged. My teammates and I embraced the same identity. I built trust with my doubles partner and the people on the other side of the net, too.

Once my parents realized the sport’s potential to bring people together, they established the Coexistence Program at the Israel Tennis Center in Haifa. It introduced young Arabs and Jews to the game, while transforming on-court partnerships into off-court friendships. The program, which began in 2001 with around 10 children, now operates nationwide with hundreds of participants.

When I was growing up, Israeli high schools and colleges did not have organized sports. But Americans know well the power of sports, as I learned when I came to Quinnipiac University in Connecticut on a tennis scholarship. Even though my teammates and I came from different corners of the world, we were all Bobcats. Social psychologists have a name for this phenomenon of a shared, complex identity. They call it a “superordinate identity.”

Playing sports can help reframe a conflict. It builds the groundwork for cooperation by putting teammates in the same boat. To paraphrase the late Morton Deutsch, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, this creates a positive interdependence: If you swim, I swim, and if you sink, I sink. It galvanizes people to do what is best for the team. If another player is in a better position to score than you are, you will pass the ball.

Sports recognizes no language barriers. Drop a soccer ball into a group of kids in Israel, South Africa or Ireland, and watch what happens. There will be no need for an introduction, let alone an explanation of the rules. Instead players communicate using their bodies within an established system of rules that makes them “speak” soccer fluently. Just as sports altered my path, it has the power to change the world.

That’s why the United Nations has declared April 6 the International Day of Sport for Development and Peace. Athletics can provide entertainment and exercise, yes, but also so much more. It can be used as a tool for tackling social issues—fighting obesity, empowering women, integrating refugees or promoting peace. Sports are more than mere games. They’re essential to the healthy transformation of society.

Convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh received a standing ovation this weekend in Chicago from ‎an enthusiastic crowd at the national conference of the organization Jewish Voice for Peace.‎

Luckily for Odeh — who took part in the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket in 1969, which killed ‎Hebrew University students Leon Kanner and Eddie Joffe — the Jewish state that she and her radical leftist ‎buddies in the U.S. Jewish community would see eradicated let her out of jail as part of a prisoner ‎exchange. Still, she has expressed no gratitude to the liberal society that set her free in 1980, or to the ‎one that has enabled her since then to roam around freely, spewing her vitriol and inciting violence. ‎On the contrary, the proud member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who feels no ‎remorse for the innocent boys she killed, also defied the country that took her in as in immigrant — ‎concealing her terrorist past in order to enter the United States.‎

Not only that. Last month, Odeh’s three-year battle with the U.S. government, which was sparked by ‎her being convicted of immigration fraud, came to a happy end with a plea bargain according to which ‎she would be stripped of her American citizenship and deported, but serve no jail time. ‎

The Rasmea Defense Committee, a vocal group of avid supporters, had the nerve to respond to this ‎piece of luck and ill-deserved generosity by saying that her decision to accept the deal was difficult, ‎but it was the best she could hope for under the “current racist political climate” of President Donald ‎Trump, in which her “prospects for a fair trial are slimmer than ever.”‎

It is bad enough that Odeh spent only 10 years in an Israeli prison. Worse still that she is getting off the ‎hook for her subsequent crime. But the fact that she has been elevated to some kind of sainthood, ‎lauded by feminist, black and other self-described human rights activists is as shocking as it is ‎shameful.‎

To add insult to injury, Jewish Voice for Peace pressured the management of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, ‎the venue rented for the hate-filled conference, not to allow a pro-Israel group to rent a separate ‎room in which to hold a memorial service for Odeh’s victims. This is a classic case of what renowned ‎law professor Alan Dershowitz calls “free speech for me and not for thee.”‎

Yes, as long as Jewish Voice for Peace and its non-Jewish counterparts — such as Students for Justice in ‎Palestine and Black Lives Matter, which use it as a cover for their anti-Semitism — have the microphone, ‎anything goes. Even glorifying cold-blooded murder. But when an organization like StandWithUs wants ‎to present an opposing viewpoint, any underhanded tactics to prevent it from doing so are kosher.‎

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Fifty years after the Six Day War, the American Jewish community is sharply fragmented, with many Jews grappling with where Zionism fits into their Jewish identity. As the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement grows in popularity and attracts more Jewish advocates, the gap is growing even wider between American Jewry and Israel.

For American Jews, Zionism has become a source of debate, controversy, embarrassment, and guilt as they try to come to terms with the activities of the Jewish state and its elected officials. Consequently, many seek to detach themselves from what used to embody the core of Jewish identity. A case in point is Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a pro-BDS Jewish group that uses its “Jewishness” to validate its cause.

While JVP’s desire to persuade the Israeli government to change its policies is legitimate, the growing strength of the BDS movement at large makes the demise of the two-state solution ever more likely. JVP’s executive director, Rebecca Vilkomerson, is notorious for her hard leftist views, as illustrated in her Washington Post op-ed entitled “I’m Jewish, and I want people to boycott Israel.” So strong is JVP’s antipathy to Israel that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has called it “the largest and most influential Jewish anti-Zionist group” in the US.

Yet the true essence of Zionism lies in its ability to encapsulate both religious and secular Jewish identities. The current challenge is to identify the component of renewal. The Zionist enterprise did not end with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Each generation must redefine Zionism as it is relevant to them.

Theodor Herzl famously wrote in his diary, “Were I to sum up the [1897] Basel Congress in a word – which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly – it would be this: ‘At Basel, I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. If not in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.’”

The difference between Herzl’s generation and post-1948 generations was a first-hand understanding of what the absence of a Jewish state means for Jewish survival. The state represents the difference between autonomy and servility, indeed between life and death. But today’s millennial generation has no memory of a time when Israel did not exist or was ever on the “right side of history.”

Given the wedge that has been pushed between Zionism and Judaism, one might even suggest that were Herzl to raise the question of a Jewish homeland today, he might not receive support. The irony is that what initially led Zionist leaders to bond over the idea of a homeland was the growing threat of antisemitism. Today, even as antisemitism is on the rise around the world, anti-Zionism is often viewed as legitimate criticism.

Abba Eban dispelled this notion eloquently, stating, “There is no difference whatever between antisemitism and the denial of Israel’s statehood. Classical antisemitism denies the equal right of Jews as citizens within society. Anti-Zionism denies the equal rights of the Jewish people its lawful sovereignty within the community of nations. The common principle in the two cases is discrimination.”

Mr. Clemmons, a Republican, is a member of the South Carolina House.

At a recent conference at the United Nations on strategies to defeat the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, J Street—a Jewish, progressive advocacy group that claims to reject BDS—sent some of its constituents to stir up controversy. J Street members wore T-shirts reading “anti-BDS & anti-occupation” and when invited to ask questions, referred to Israel as an “illegal occupier.”

The former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky was also in attendance. His “3D” test has become the standard used by the U.S. State Department and other institutions to determine when criticism of Israel crosses the line into anti-Semitism. Mr. Sharansky’s three Ds are delegitimization, demonization and double standards. Measured this way, J Street is itself anti-Semitic.

Using the term “occupier” is a polite way of demonizing Israel as a thief. It suggests that Jewish invaders colonized territory rightfully belonging to the Arabs. Talk about a double standard. To suggest that Jews are occupiers in a region known for more than 3,000 years as Judea is as ridiculous as suggesting that Arabs currently living in Arabia are occupiers.

“Occupier” is a legal term that does not apply to Israel. Israel’s legal title and rights to its present territory were established in the San Remo resolution, an agreement adopted by victorious Allied Powers after World War I, confirmed by the League of Nations, and incorporated into the U.N. charter. None of the Jewish people’s rights to live, emigrate to and settle the land of Israel have ever been revoked, nullified or superseded by a subsequent act of international law.

Calling Israel an “occupier” has become essential to anti-Israel forces, as they persist in efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state. A U.N. resolution passed in December demands that “Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

Tarring Israel with the “occupier” label also gives its violent enemies grounds upon which to portray terrorism as resistance to occupation. When an Israeli killed a Palestinian who was attempting to stab an Israeli soldier in 2015, the Palestinian Authority claimed that the occurrence “exposes the ugly face of the occupation” and “its crimes against the helpless Palestinian people.”