RUTHFULLY YOURS

Moshav Hagor is located in the center of the country.

Successive IDF chiefs of General Staff, Lt. Gen. (ret.) Dan Halutz and Lt. Gen. (ret.) Gabi Ashkenazy hail from the farming community established in 1949 by veterans of the Palmach.

Along with their neighbors in Moshav Yarchiv, for the past decade, the farmers of Hagor have been subjected to the continuous desecration of their communal cemetery by their Muslim neighbors from Jaljulia, a Muslim town of ten thousand located between the two moshavim.

Adjacent to a school in Jaljulia, Hagor’s cemetery has been subjected to abuse of all kinds. Residents regularly find animal carcasses at the entrance to the cemetery. Garbage is routinely dumped on graves.

Human and other feces are frequently smeared across headstones.

One night, all the headstones on all the graves at the cemetery were broken.

Residents mourning their dead are harassed.

After a decade of constant abuse, Hagor’s residents despaired of ever restoring the security to their cemetery and decided to take matters into the own hands. With the halachic approval of then chief rabbi Shlomo Amar, they built an alternative cemetery in another area of their moshav. Families paid thousands of shekels to reinter their loved ones at the new site. Today the only bodies remaining in their original graves are the ones with no living relatives to pay to move them.

Several years ago, Moshav Yarchiv’s cemetery was rezoned to become a new neighborhood in Jaljulia.

An attempt by Yarchiv’s residents to fence off the cemetery failed.

The day after they installed the fence it was stolen.

The rabbinate has refused on halachic grounds to permit Yarchiv’s residents to exhume and reinter their dead. But even if they had rabbinic permission, they have nowhere else to bury them. Due to bureaucratic hurdles, Yarchiv hasn’t been able to find an alternative burial ground.

Jaljulya once had good relations with its Jewish neighbors. But over the past decade, the town has become a hotbed for Islamic radicalism. Residents built a new massive mosque in the town. Despite repeated complaints from their Jewish neighbors, the mosque’s loudspeakers, which face Hagor, deliberately blast the call to prayer in the middle of the night.

Last October, Nedal Salah of Jaljulia paraglided into Syria from the Golan Heights and joined Islamic State. Following Salah’s action, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) discovered a cell of six more town residents who had transferred their loyalties to Islamic State, which they intended to travel to Syria to join.

This article is excerpted from a longer piece in the Tower.

When Arielle Mokhtarzadeh arrived at University of California, Berkeley, to attend the annual Students of Color Conference, she had no way of knowing that she would be leaving as a victim of anti-Semitism.

The conference has maintained a reputation for 27 years as being a “safe space” where students of color, as well as white progressive allies, can discuss issues of structural and cultural inequality on college campuses.

For Mokhtarzadeh, an Iranian Jew at UCLA, her freshman year was punctuated by incidents of anti-Semitism that were both personal and met with national controversy. She was shocked during her first quarter in school, when students entered the Bruin Cafe to see the phrase “Hitler did nothing wrong” etched into a table. Months later, Mokhtarzadeh’s friend Rachel Beyda was temporarily denied a student government leadership position based solely on her Jewish identity, an event that made news nationwide.

The campus was supposed to be her new home, her new safe space — so why didn’t she feel that way? She went to the conference hoping for some answers.

[So you’re a Jew and you’re starting college? Prepare for anti-Zionism.]

But on the first day there, she was horrified when the discussion became an attack on Israel — and soon devolved into attacks on the Jews.

“Over the course of what was probably no longer than an hour, my history was denied, the murder of my people was justified, and a movement whose sole purpose is the destruction of the Jewish homeland was glorified. Statements were made justifying the ruthless murder of innocent Israeli civilians, blatantly denying Jewish indigeneity in the land, and denying the Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered,” she said. “Why anyone in their right mind would accept these slanders as truths baffles me. But they did. These statements, and others, were met with endless snaps and cheers. I was taken aback.”

Mokhtarzadeh walked out on the verge of tears. “It was in that moment, during that conference, that I realized that every identity and every intersection of identity was to be welcomed and championed in progressive spaces — except mine.”

President Obama and his defenders are trumpeting the new aid agreement with Israel as proof that he is the best friend Israel ever had in the White House. In fact, it’s a bad deal and should be treated the same way Obama treated prior agreements he didn’t like: It should be forgotten by the next president. The White House may be saying this is the greatest deal ever, but in Israel many observers are saying that Obama did no favors for the Jewish state. That’s the conclusion Israeli journalists have all reached. They’re right.

The current aid agreement is for $3.1 billion a year. The new one is for $3.8 billion, but the increase is almost entirely illusory. Congress already appropriates hundreds of millions of dollars beyond the base $3.1 billion level for Israel’s missile defense, so the current aid level is actually about $3.5 billion. That means the total increase is roughly $300 million a year. But given inflation in the costs of military items, and the greater threat to Israel due to Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, the net result is at best continuation of the current aid agreement.

But Obama imposed two additional conditions that had never existed before and are absent in the aid agreement George W. Bush made with Israel in 2007. First, Israel must spend every dime in the United States after a phase-in period, meaning it cannot use the funds to purchase any military equipment made in Israel. Second, Israel has agreed that it will not go to Congress to seek additional funding under any circumstances.

The latter condition is a big deal and is why Sen. Lindsey Graham is so opposed to what Obama has wrought. It’s “not binding on the Congress,” he said this week. “I’m offended that the administration would try to take over the appropriations process. If they don’t like what I’m doing, they can veto the bill. We can’t have the executive branch dictating what the legislative branch will do for a decade based on an agreement we are not a party to.” And Speaker Paul Ryan’s spokeswoman said, “We will continue to appropriate the funds that we determine are necessary to meet the needs of our shared security interests in the Middle East.”

There is another condition in this agreement that is more absurd, and belies Obama’s claims of deepest friendship for the Jewish state. As the price for concluding the deal, Obama forced Israel to agree that if Congress appropriates additional funds in 2017 or 2018, Israel will not accept the aid and will return the money. This is a first in American history and constitutes a deliberate undermining of the constitutional power of Congress to determine foreign aid levels.

“To use the term ‘honor killing’ when describing the murder of a family member — overwhelmingly females — due to the perpetrators’ belief that they have brought ‘shame’ on a family normalizes murder for cultural reasons and sets it apart from other killings when there should be no distinction.” — Jane Collins, MEP, UK Independence Party.

Voter fraud has been deliberately overlooked in Muslim communities because of “political correctness,” according to Sir Eric Pickles, author of a government report on voter fraud.

“Not only should we raise the flag, but everybody in the Muslim community should have to pledge loyalty to Britain in schools. There is no conflict between being a Muslim and a Briton.” — Khalil Yousuf, spokesman for the Ahmadiyya Muslim community.

Only a tiny proportion — between five and ten percent — of the people whose asylum applications are denied are actually deported, according to a British asylum judge, quoted in the Daily Mail.

Police in Telford — dubbed the child sex capital of Britain — were accused of covering up allegations that hundreds of children in the town were sexually exploited by Pakistani sex gangs.

August 1. Nearly 900 Syrians in Britain were arrested in 2015 for crimes including rape and child abuse, police statistics revealed. The British government has pledged to resettle up to 20,000 Syrian refugees in the UK by the end of 2020. “The government seems not to have vetted those it has invited into the country,” said MEP Ray Finch. The disclosure came after Northumbria Police and the BBC were accused of covering up allegations that a gang of Syrians sexually assaulted two teenage girls in a park in Newcastle.

August 1. Male refugees settling in Britain must receive formal training on how to treat women, a senior Labour MP said. Thangam Debbonaire, chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Refugees, called for a “refugee integration strategy” so that men “understand what is expected of them.” She said it could help prevent sexual harassment and issues “including genital mutilation.”

August 2. Jane Collins, MEP for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), launched a petition calling for the BBC to stop using the term “honor killing.” The petition says the term “cultural murder” should be used instead. It states:

“To use the term ‘honor killing’ when describing the murder of a family member — overwhelmingly females — due to the perpetrators’ belief that they have brought ‘shame’ on a family normalizes murder for cultural reasons and sets it apart from other killings when there should be no distinction.

“Murder is murder, whether it be for cultural excuses or others. The term ‘honor killing’ is a euphemism for a brutal murder based on cultural beliefs which have no place in Britain or anywhere else in the world.”

August 3. Zakaria Bulhan, a 19-year-old Norwegian man of Somali descent, stabbed to death an American woman in London’s Russell Square. He also wounded five others. Police dismissed terror as a possible motive for the attack, which they blamed on mental health problems. But HeatStreet, a news and opinion website, revealed that Bulhan had uploaded books advocating violent jihad on social media sites.

August 4. A public swimming pool in Luton announced gender-segregated sessions for “cultural reasons.” The move will give men exclusive access to the larger 50-meter pool, while women will have to use the smaller 20-meter pool. The gender-segregated sessions are named ‘Alhamdulillahswimming,’ an Arabic phrase which means “Praise be to Allah.” UKIP MEP Jane Collins said the decision to have segregated times for swimming was “a step backwards for community relations and gender equality.” She added:

“The leisure center said this is for cultural reasons and I think we all know that means for the Muslim community. This kind of behavior, pandering to one group, harms community relations and creates tension. Under English law we have equality between men and women. This is not the same in cultures that believe in Sharia Law.”

August 5. Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood may be allowed to seek asylum in Britain, according to new guidance from the Home Office. The document states that high profile or politically active members

“may be able to show that they are at risk of persecution, including of being held in detention, where they may be at risk of ill-treatment, trial also without due process and disproportionate punishment…. In such cases, a grant of asylum will be appropriate.”

The new guidance contradicts previous government policy. In December 2015, then Prime Minister David Cameron said Britain would “refuse visas to members and associates of the Muslim Brotherhood who are on record as having made extremist comments.”

August 5. Stephen Bennett, a 39-year-old father of seven from Manchester, was sentenced to 180 hours of community service for posting “grossly offensive” anti-Muslim comments on Facebook. One of the offending comments: “Don’t come over to this country and treat it like your own. Britain first.” He was arrested under the Malicious Communications Act. The judge said Bennett, whose mother-in-law and sister-in-law are Muslims, was guilty of “running the risk of stirring up racial hatred.” He described it as “conduct capable of playing into the hands of the enemies of this country.”

August 6. British MPs face a six-year alcohol ban when the Palace of Westminster, which has dozens of bars and restaurants, undergoes a multi-billion-pound refurbishment beginning in 2020. They will move to an office building operating under Islamic Sharia law. Their new home, Richmond House, is one of three government buildings which switched ownership from British taxpayers to Middle Eastern investors in 2014 to finance a £200 million Islamic bond scheme — as part of an effort to make the UK a global hub for Islamic finance. Critics say the scheme effectively imposes Sharia law onto government premises.

President Obama recently set a goal to double renewable power generation in the U.S. by 2020. At the same time, he suggested ending oil company tax breaks and using them, instead, to bolster solar and wind industries. The U.S. government is investing more than $1 trillion in green energy, the so-called “clean” energy alternative, while choking off coal and natural gas production with increasingly onerous regulations.

In their book, Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy, authors Stephen Moore and Kathleen Hartnett White argue against the shift to renewables. Using energy-production statistics and the historic contributions of fossil fuels, they explode the myths promulgated by renewables cheerleaders. They expose the extensive misinformation on clean energy resources to effectively argue against what they believe would be a disastrous, energy production shift that would have serious lifestyle and geopolitical consequences for Americans.

Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy

By Stephen Moore and Kathleen Hartnett White

Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2016

256 pp., $18.94

Promoters of renewable energy sources — the supposed “low environmental impact” alternative to fossil fuels — are putting forth a false narrative, Moore and White assert.

Rather than worrying that carbon energy resources are destroying the planet and looking to renewable energy as an alternative, the authors suggest we should celebrate the vast contributions fossil fuels made during the past century, advancing mankind and making our lives safer, more productive and economically and politically secure. The U.S. has more recoverable energy supplies than any nation on earth, the authors posit. With fairly recent shale oil and natural gas discoveries and newer technologies of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking, we are in no danger of running out any time soon. It should be welcome news, they urge, that the U.S. can be energy independent within the next few years and be the world’s dominant energy producer. Freedom from OPEC manipulations and the potential for millions of jobs that would substantially add to our gross domestic product, benefits our national security and would be a welcome boon to our relatively stagnant economy.

Moore and White explain how the Industrial Revolution, fueled by carbon energy usage, broke through decades of static human existence and brought significant and historic, upward trends for the average person, including a tripling of life expectancy and a 10- to 30-fold increase in per-capita, real income. Coal and petroleum transformed into energy for mechanical power was the most important energy conversion in industrial civilization. With coal-powered machines, man was suddenly liberated from the physical limitations of muscle and beasts of burden. When electricity became available, heat, power and countless household appliances, industrial motors and electronics were developed, generating a second, energy revolution.

Carbon-resource usage (and the invention of the internal combustion engine) brought liberty, mobility and choice, enabling sustained productivity and economic growth, the authors maintain. Additionally, it revolutionized the science and practice of metallurgy and dramatically transformed textile production. Previously expensive and tedious to produce, clothing became more affordable and warmer; winter clothing became available. Today, 60% of global fibers come from fossil fuels. In addition, fossil fuels played and continue to play an important role in reducing food supply loss by refrigeration, packaging and containers.

The authors marvel at the transformation that took place in a newly industrialized society. Until coal was harnessed on a massive scale, humans were dependent on energy from plants, wood, animals and human muscle, as well as wind and water flows. The dramatic shift from diffuse and variable flows of energy — wind and water — to massive stores of hydrocarbon minerals was a turning point for human progress. Energy became transportable, controllable, affordable, dense, reliable and versatile.

The other day Lisa Erskine, of Barnegat, New Jersey, alerted me to a bizarre story involving Islamic cleaning rituals and a second-grade class at Cecil S. Collins School.

Yes, Islamic cleaning rituals.

The Asbury Park Press reports that a second-grader came home with a health and hygiene worksheet that included references to hijabs and thawbs – clothing worn by religious Muslims.

The worksheet also included a reference from the Koran: “Allah loves those who make themselves clean and pure.”

Journalist Amanda Oglesby first exposed this peculiar incident – interviewing parent Chris Sharpe.

“Everybody was up in arms,” he told the reporter.

So why is a public school in New Jersey teaching children about Islamic cleaning rituals?

Well, the Barnegat Township School District tells me it was all a great big mistake. A whopper of a mistake.

“This worksheet – which was neither carefully reviewed by the teacher nor approved by an administrator – contained a religious reference, in clear violation of district policy,” Supt. Karen Wood told me in a statement.

She blamed the incident on a “novice instructor” who “downloaded a worksheet from the online sharing site Pinterest and utilized it during a lesson.”

So the kids are being taught how to clean the hijabs by a novice?

“We recognize the significance of this error,” she added. “Our parents have been extremely supportive as we take measures necessary to ensure that this remains an isolated incident.”

As you might imagine, folks around Barnegat are a bit upset over what happened.

“If this had the name of Jesus on it, there would be an even bigger outrage,” Mrs. Erskine told me.

That’s a good point. The Good Book does tell us that we can be washed whiter than snow.

“I hope that proper precautions are made to prevent further indoctrination of Islam,” she added.

Rob Russo has a child enrolled in the same school district and he is equally disturbed. He said “zero accountability” is simply unacceptable.

A student at Colorado College wrote a piece claiming that the school’s commitment to a healthy lifestyle is actually a bad thing — because it’s body-shaming people, particularly men.

“Several aspects of the CC community such as numerous healthy eating habits, gym programs, and outdoor activities, foster a culture of body shaming even for male students,” Jade Pearl Frost, a senior who is a double major in feminist and gender studies and English, writes in a piece for the Feminist Wire.

“While I am not suggesting that these aspects are detrimental in and of themselves, I argue that the College values these things in ways that are overwhelming and exclusionary,” she adds.

First of all, she’s correct that “healthy eating habits, gym programs, and outdoor activities” are most certainly not “detrimental.” They are, in fact, this thing called “good.” It’s good that her school cafeteria has “an abundance of” healthy food options and “a renovated fitness center.” What would she rather have, a cafeteria that serves only bologna and cheese sandwiches on white bread and a dirty garbage gym with a bunch of broken machines, just so overweight kids wouldn’t feel bad about themselves?

Her attitude in this piece is one that has become all-too common — one that focuses on victimization rather than empowerment. The right attitude would be to say that it’s great that those students who are out of shape have so many campus resources to help them change that if they wanted to.

By the way, the fact that they are, indeed, campus resources — that is, available to all students — makes her claim that they are “exclusionary” completely illogical. After all, “available to all students” is the opposite of “exclusionary,” and it shouldn’t be surprising that nowhere in her piece does she provide a single, concrete example of how they are “exclusionary” other than to say that to say that there’s “an unspoken rule” in the gym “that the cardio section is for the feminine and the weight room is for the masculine.”

First of all, I’d argue that her observation that more women use the cardio section and more men use weight room is probably due to the fact that women just generally are more interested in cardio, and men just generally are more interested in weight-training. In any case, calling it “exclusionary” when, as she herself admits, “the fitness center is open to all genders and everyone a part of the CC community” is factually incorrect. What is the school supposed to do? Force female students to get buff as hell when they don’t want to? Force dudes to get drop their weights and hop on a stationary bike?

In her discussion of fitness-masculinity issues, she also laments the fact that “if the male student doesn’t participate in outdoor activities such as Winterfest and BreakOut Trips, then they are seen as not having body management.” Personally, I’d say that if your biggest problem is that your school is offering too many ski trips, then you are probably doing just fine.

Other than ski trips, another program that Frost sees as problematic is the “Tigers Don’t Waste” program, which discourages students from wasting food.

On Tuesday night, the person touted as “Israel’s most famous living author” appeared on the BBC to promote his latest book. In the course of his interview with “Newsnight” host Kirsty Wark, Amos Oz engaged in his second favorite activity (after receiving international awards and having his novels turned into movies starring the likes of Natalie Portman): He slammed the nation of his birth, which turned him into a cultural icon.

To be fair to Oz, bashing the Jewish state that he represents with such panache is key to his success abroad. Talent is a factor, of course, but it is neither sufficient nor a prerequisite to inspiring adoration among the literati and political elites.

Indeed, had he not been the darling of the Left, the odds are slim that Oz would have been invited by the U.K. network to discuss “Judas,” his take on the famous traitor whose story constituted the “Chernobyl of Western anti-Semitism for 2,000 years,” and the basis for “pogroms, inquisitions, persecutions and the Holocaust.”

From the BBC’s point of view, having Israel’s crowned jewel provide a stamp of approval for its own dim view of the Jewish state is an opportunity not to be missed or squandered. Nor does any topic segue better into what Wark was really after than “persecution.”

With virtuosity born of brilliance, Oz managed to go above and beyond the call of duty — “defending” his homeland by likening it to the worst of evil regimes.

“If people call Israel ‘nasty,’ I to some degree agree,” he said. “If people call Israel the ‘devil incarnate,’ I think they are obsessed; they are mad. But this is still legitimate. But if they carry on saying that therefore there should be no Israel, that’s where anti-Zionism becomes anti-Semitism, because none of them ever said after Hitler that Germany should cease to exist, or after Stalin that there should be no Russia.”

Oz pulled a similar stunt when explaining his opposition to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. It is wrong, he said, “because it hardens the Israeli resistance, and deepens the Israeli paranoia that the whole world is [and] always has been against us [as if to say]: ‘They [the boycotters] don’t even discriminate between one Israeli and the next; they boycott all of us, and whatever we do, they are going to hate us, so let’s be bad guys for a change.'”

Furthermore, he added, just because boycotts were effective in the case of South Africa, “you have to be very stupid to think the prescription — the medicine — that worked very well against cholera will also kill the plague. This is a kind of mental laziness.”

The United States and Israel have signed a deal that will provide $38 billion in foreign aid for Israel, all of it for defense spending, over a 10-year period beginning in 2017.

This averages out to $3.8 billion per year, which is about $700 million more annually than the $3.1 billion per year Israel received before the deal was signed.

The new agreement includes foreign aid appropriation for the first time, funds for missile defense, which in recent years was an additional appropriation of approximately $500 million, made by Congress on an annual basis. In total, the agreement seems to provide Israel with $200 million more per year, $3.8 billion versus $3.6 billion. It turns out that as the discussions between Israel and the U.S. were taking place, Congress had decided to appropriate $3.4 billion of regular foreign aid, plus an additional $600 million for missile defense in 2017, or $4 billion in total, $200 million higher than the level for 2017 and later years within the framework of the new memorandum of understanding.

The new deal contains a few provisions that are unique and certainly new in the history of U.S. military aid to Israel. One provision the Americans fought hard for was that all of the money allocated to Israel must be spent in the United States. The shift to 100% spending in the U.S. will be gradual: Under the current understanding, Israel was able to convert some 26% of the funds into shekels, to be used for procurement in Israel. Starting in the sixth year, however, that percentage will gradually decline, until by the 10th year Israel will have to spend all the funds in the U.S.

Israel’s chief negotiator, Jacob Nagel, said that if under the current memorandum of understanding some $7.8 billion could be spent in Israel, under the new understanding that number will drop to $5.6 billion. He stressed, however, that this will occur gradually, and that the defense establishment will continue to receive roughly the same amount of money from the U.S. that it has received up to now until 2026, which will give it plenty of time to prepare for the new reality.

The most remarkable provision in the new agreement concerns the limitations on Congress to appropriate any more money for Israel. Congress has the power of the purse, and the president can not send money to any country for foreign aid that Congress does not provide. The new agreement, however, requires Israel to refuse any additional funds that Congress might choose to appropriate for Israel in 2017 and 2018, beyond the memorandum of understanding limit of $3.8 billion per year.

Bloomberg columnist Josh Rogin argues that the limitation is unprecedented: “In an unprecedented arrangement, the White House and the Israeli government have found a way to prevent Congress from increasing U.S. aid for 2017 and 2018. The Israeli government has pledged to return any money given by Congress above the memorandum of understanding levels for those two years.”

The agreement does not provide such “reimbursement of the excess” language for the following eight years, but such a concept for even two years is not sitting well with some members of Congress, who see it as an attempt to shift power from Congress to the White House. If, for instance, Israel were to be drawn into another war with Hezbollah or Hamas in the next two years, Congress would almost certainly seek to provide the assistance Israel might require, beyond the current commitment, particularly for missile defense. The memorandum of understanding allows Israel to ask for more in the event of war, but the definition of a war could become an issue.

In general, there is more bipartisanship in Congress on spending money to help Israel than almost anything else on its table these days. Other issues concerning Israel have, by and large, also been historically bipartisan. Meanwhile, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was unanimously rejected by Republicans and endorsed by 85% of Democrats, a quarter of whom boycotted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress, including Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s current running mate. It is unclear whether opposition to the two-year give-back provision will be one that members of both parties fight, or just the Republicans. One might think that a president pressuring an Israeli prime minister to refuse to accept financial support for his country’s military from Congress, which historically has been more consistently supportive of the U.S.-Israel relationship than the White House), would draw a sharp rebuke from members from both parties.

As another academic year begins at American colleges and universities, one can expect to see a continuation of the pattern in recent years in which many Jewish students either take a neutral stance in the face of the currently rampant campus assault on Israel or actually join in the assault.

Among the latter, some embrace the self-described “pro-Israel” but, in fact, Israel-bashing campus incarnation of J-Street, while others go further and enlist in the ranks of groups less coy than J Street, groups that, for example, more unambiguously promote the boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) agenda against Israel.

These include the explicitly anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). A number of Jewish students even join the cadres of the often openly anti-Semitic Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), founded as an offshoot of the General Union of Palestinian Students and now the premiere BDS-cheerleading, Israel-demonizing organization on American campuses.

Significant voices in the Jewish community, looking at this phenomenon, and perceiving as well in some quarters beyond the universities a decrease in American Jewish identification with Israel, correlate these developments with supposed Israeli government failure to take steps towards advancing peace.

This argument has been made by, among others, Gary Rosenblatt, editor and publisher of The Jewish Week, a newspaper produced with the support of the UJA-Federation of New York.

In an article that appeared earlier this year under the title “Frustration with Israel Growing Here at Home,” Rosenblatt discusses what he reports as having heard from members of the Jewish community, including community leaders, of grievances against Israel. Seemingly topping the list, and reflecting a view clearly shared by Rosenblatt, is “The hard fact… that Israel’s leadership is moving in a direction at odds with the next generation of Americans, including many Jews, who want to see greater efforts to resolve the Palestinian conflict and who put the onus for the impasse on Jerusalem.”

In the same vein, Rosenblatt observes, “Whether or not it is fair, the strong perception today is that the Israeli government is moving further right, and intransigent…” And “One national leader told me he’d like to fly to Israel, with a group of his top colleagues, to try to convince Netanyahu in dramatic fashion of the need for ‘a plan, any plan’ to break the impasse.”

And while these statements are couched as representing what Rosenblatt has heard from others, it is in his own voice that he states near the end of the piece “… Netanyahu and his government will continue to make decisions based on their own narrow and immediate political interests, and we can only hope they will coincide with national interests as well.”

The obvious implication is that the author does not see the prime minister as having been acting in Israel’s national interest, and that – reflecting the thrust of the article – Rosenblatt is referring specifically to the prime minister’s not being forthcoming enough in the quest for peace.

But can the falling away from Israel observed among many Jewish students on American campuses and among others in the American Jewish community genuinely be correlated with Israel’s not doing enough to advance peace?

First, is it true that Israel is responsible for the impasse vis-a-vis peace?

Any objective look at the history of efforts to achieve peace and at the reality on the ground today can only conclude that the claim of Israeli culpability is not credible.

Palestinian leadership is currently divided between Hamas, which rules Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas, which governs in Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank.

Hamas is openly dedicated not only to the killing of all Jews in Israel but all Jews worldwide. With Israel’s total withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the Palestinians living there were free to turn the territory into another Singapore or Hong Kong and would have had wide Arab world and other support for doing so. That their leaders have chosen instead to eschew pursuing the building of a prosperous state for the sake of hewing to their genocidal priorities can hardly be blamed on Israel and cannot be remedied by any Israeli concessions.
The agenda of the Palestinian Authority differs little from that of Hamas. Abbas and his PA and Fatah associates insist on Israel’s illegitimacy and assert constantly that Jews have no historical, authentic connection to the land and are merely colonialist usurpers whose presence must be extirpated. The message hammered in their media, preached in their mosques, and taught in their schools is lurid defamation of Jews and the promotion of dedication to Jew-killing and to Israel’s destruction as the obligation of every Palestinian.

Abbas himself has repeatedly insisted that he will never recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state within any borders. He has rejected every offer of territorial compromise because proposals of a settlement have been conditioned on such Palestinian recognition of Israel and explicit acceptance of an agreement as a final status document. He and those around him refuse to forego future additional claims against Israel with the ultimate objective of the Jewish state’s dissolution. This was the same reason why Arafat in 2000 rejected Ehud Barak and President Clinton’s offers of a settlement and instead launched his terror war against Israel.