By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO–The brilliant columnist for The Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick, recently lamented the lack of civil rights pertaining to Jews when it comes to the Middle East. She was referring to the built-in onus imposed on the building of settlement communities in Judea-Samaria (the West Bank) and the self-righteousness of other nations about this issue, even as unrestrained construction of houses, agencies, political centers and such by Palestinians in the exact same region is spared the moralizing of Europe, African nations, and the Obama administration.
Palestinians are also trying to create “facts on the ground” before the political sealing of the area takes effect—if the Palestinians ever agree on who actually speaks for them (Hamas? Fatah? Iran?) and what actually is their motivation for having a state, other than to follow-up on their chartered and still-standing declaration to devour Israel as the next step.
I don’t think Jews lack for civil rights, but I do agree that few nations seize the moment to be right about this democratic miracle created by the same United Nations that now systemically excoriates it. What is also is clear is that hardly anyone outside of Israel is very civil to this exemplary beacon of nation-building.
President Obama seems to bemused that the settlements issue is now the snag in the peace talks (a dialogue in which Israel is pre-slated to divide its own capital, withdraw its forces to the point where several Arab nations invaded in 1967, and allow for the return of “refugees” from a culture that trains its children to be suicide bombers and to wipe out the Jewish state). The president is bewildered and cross even though he is the one who put the settlements right into the center of the discussion from the get-go.
That is almost as dysfunctional as restarting a war in Afghanistan with an announcement of exactly when American troops will be withdrawn from the site.
Never mind that Europe following World War II became a continental paroxysm of settlement-building and land-haggling and rewriting of maps, provincial and national, from Poland to Holland and then back to Germany itself. Eleven million innocent civilians (including six million Jews) had been exterminated and now the descendants of these terror-polities are accusing Israel of obstructing peace because it is building schools, installing plumbing, creating jobs (including for many Palestinians) in a small corner of the world that, till now, had been ravaged by empires from Rome to the Ottomans to the Jordanians themselves.
Indeed, Jordan was the previous landlord of the West Bank (1948-1967) and no one got up and debated its policies in the United Nations while those beautiful, biblical hills lay stagnant, un-irrigated, and Jewish cemeteries, synagogues, academies, and people were dismantled and removed.
Palestine, you need better friends than the ones you are courting—people who are civil and right.
*
Rabbi Kamin is based in San Diego