Episode No. 145--The Ongoing Campus and Other Protests

The ignorance being displayed by college campus protestors is astounding--and it bodes ill for this country as well as for Israel. This isn't a very long episode, but it IS an important one.

Transcript

Episode No. 145--The Ongoing Campus and Other Protests

Welcome to Keep the Faith, the biweekly podcast that explores contemporary issues through the prism of Jewish law and tradition. You probably think this episode is more than a week late, and technically it is, but only because we’ve changed the biweekly schedule, which means Episode No. 146, God-willing, will appear on May 23rd, and then every two weeks thereafter.

This episode was delayed because the news is rapidly changing from day to day when it comes to all matters Israel.

So the topic for this week is Israel, and specifically the protests that are raging all around the United States and the world.

With a punishing war in Gaza, threats from next door neighbors Lebanon and Syria in the north, and from far distant Iran, campus protests all across this nation demanding an end to U.S. support for Israel, and protests of all kinds throughout the world ostensibly spurred on by the Gaza war, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is very much on the front burner.

Without a doubt, it’s among the thorniest of all issues facing the world today.

The protests on campus and off are particularly troubling for what they portend for the future of this country, as well as for Israel: Not only are these college protestors demonstrating just how ignorant they are about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they also are demonstrating that they have no interest in learning how the conflict began, how it exploded in a war 76 years ago, and how violently it’s played itself out since then.

Because America’s future leaders will be drawn from this age group, it bodes ill for the continuing alliance between Israel and the United States. It also bodes ill for the United States, because it suggests that tomorrow’s leaders have little regard for facts when it comes to making important decisions that can affect policy.

They demand that Israel end its war against Hamas, but they do not demand that Hamas be held accountable for the massacres, mutilations, and rapes its forces carried out on October 7th.  Even worse, as recent polls show, many of these demonstrators actually believe that Hamas was justified in doing all those horrendous things because Israel, after all, has refused to give Palestinians a state of their own.

They clearly do not know—or they do not care to know—that the last legitimate, indigenous, native government in “Palestine” was a Jewish one, and that the land was ruled by occupiers for the next 1,812 years, until the United Nations divided the area into two individual states—a Palestinian Jewish State and a Palestinian Arab State—on Nov. 29, 1947.

These demonstrators also clearly do not know—or they do not care to know—that for most of the last 76 years since the modern State of Israel came into being, it has been the Arabs themselves who have prevented the creation of a Palestinian Arab state.

I put “Palestine” in quotes because what that name represents is critical to the claims by Palestinian leaders and others that the Jews have no legitimate claims to any part of “Palestine.” The Second Jewish Commonwealth came to an end following the collapse of the Bar Kochba Revolt in 135 C.E. The Emperor Hadrian, desirous of putting an end once and for all to the rebelliousness of the Jews, ordered that Rome’s three regional provinces—Judea, Samaria, and Galilee in the south—be merged with parts of Syria in the north, and that the newly created province be renamed Syria-Palaestina.

Hadrian chose “Palaestina” for two reasons. First, it recalled the Philistines, the ancient and persistent enemy that Israel finally vanquished by the 6th Century B.C.E. In effect, Hadrian was saying that the Philistines were the ones who had vanquished Israel. The second and perhaps more important reason was that Hadrian wanted to strip Judea, Samaria, and the Galilee of their Jewish identity. By severing the Jewish people's ties to their historical homeland, he hoped to remove any claims they might make to regain it in the future.

For the next 1,812 years, until the U.N. voted to partition “Palestine,” the region was ruled by a succession of occupiers: the Romans, the Byzantines, various early Muslim dynasties, the Crusaders (twice), a couple of sultanates, the Turks, and finally by the British and the French under the authority given to them after World War I by the League of Nations.

The two states the U.N. created on Nov. 29, 1947, the Palestinian Jewish State, and the Palestinian Arab State, were to be the first legitimate authorities in that region in nearly two millennia. (It must be noted that “Palestinian” is not a distinct national identity and was never considered as one until the mid-1920s. Anyone born in or was a citizen of “Palestine”—Jew, Muslim, or Christian—was considered a Palestinian until partition came into effect.)

By the U.N.’s partition vote, a Palestinian Arab state could have could have been established alongside the Palestinian Jewish State. That is what the United Nations said should happen, but that is not what seven existing Arab states wanted to see happen. Rather than establishing a Palestinian state and celebrating its birth, they invaded Israel instead.

After they lost that war and an armistice was signed in 1949, they had a second opportunity to create that state. Egypt, however, had occupied Gaza and the Sinai desert by then; Syria had seized the Golan Heights; and Jordan had seized the West Bank, which it eventually formally annexed. In other words, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan now occupied their individual portions of what was supposed to be a Palestinian state, and they had no intention of giving up any of it to creates that state.

After the June 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel occupied the lands illegally held for 19 years by Egypt, Syria and Jordan, it sued for peace—the victor, mind you, sued for peace, something unheard of in world history—but the Arab League, meeting in Khartoum in November 1967, responded to Israel with the infamous Three No’s: No peace with Israel. No recognition of Israel. No negotiations with Israel. That meant that there was a fourth No buried among the other three: No Palestinian state.

In December 1973, just two months after the Yom Kippur War, the U.N. held a peace conference in Geneva. Again, Israel was willing to negotiate. Again, the Arab states said no. Syria, in fact, refused to even attend the conference.

Five years later, Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David Accords, which resulted in a peace treaty being signed the following year, in 1979. Israel agreed to withdraw from the Sinai peninsula. Egypt, for its part, wanting nothing to do with Gaza, left Israel in charge there.

Yet another opportunity came in September 1993, when Israel and the Palestinians signed the Oslo Accords which established a confidence-building process that would have led to the formation of a Palestinian Arab State, but then Yasser Arafat and his PLO negotiators went home and unleashed a wave of terror that took many Israeli lives over the next seven years. Confidence building turned into confidence shattering.

Still, the Israelis refused to give up. They tried again at Camp David in July 2000. Not only did Israel agree to establish a Palestinian Arab State, but Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat 90 percent of the West Bank and Gaza for that state, and even a portion of East Jerusalem for its capital. Arafat refused the offer. Instead, he went home to Ramallah, and launched the Second Intifada two months later. Among the worst incidents of that uprising occurred a year later, in August 2001, when a suicide bomber entered a Sbarro pizza shop in Jerusalem and killed 15 people, including seven children and a pregnant woman, and left 130 others injured.

To quote something then Foreign Minister Abba Eban said at the Geneva Peace Conference in 1973, “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Israel’s hands are not as clean as they should be, but that is because Arab terrorism and the disregard Palestinian leaders have for the agreements they sign, and for the suffering that causes for their own people, have radicalized Israelis and their politics.

Does all this sound like the Israel that the protestors are incensed about? As I said, they either do not know the history, or they simply do not care to know.

Perhaps even more troubling than the ignorance of the protestors is the indifference to this history shown by world leaders who side with the Palestinians against Israel, and by the so-called “progressives” in Congress, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (Ind-Vt.) and the “Squad” in the House led by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).

They all claim to know the truth about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and their “truth” is having a profound influence on so many other here and around the world. To quote W. Somerset Maugham, however, “The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.”

Not only is it not a guarantee, but in this case, the “truth” is a falsehood that continues to have devastating consequences.

This is Rabbi Shammai Engelmayer. I do hope you come back for my next podcast, and I’d like to hear what you have to say about this or my other podcasts. Go to www.shammai.org—w-w-w-dot-s-h-a-m-m-a-i-dot-o-r-g—and email please.

If you don’t get the Jewish Standard but want to read my columns, go to the columns page of my website. The latest column, to be released on Friday, is about the revival of the charge that we Jews—all of us collectively—killed Jesus Christ. It’s a charge that was levelled by two Republican members of the House of Representatives, Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

Have a great week, stay healthy, keep wearing those N95 masks in indoor venues no matter who tells you otherwise, and get fully vaccinated if you haven’t done so as yet, including both the third and fourth booster shots.

And above all, stay safe.