“Activists” — don’t you just love that term for haters? — pronounced last week in Manhattan, “We don’t want no two state, we want all of it . . . Israel can go to hell.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters said this in front of the Israeli Consulate. Not two states, Israel and Palestine; only one state, Palestine. Just in case you missed the implication, “Israel can go to hell.”
The protesters chanted, “From the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.” Just in case someone misses the intent, it is: Palestine should occupy all the land that now constitutes the State of Israel, whether the West Bank is or is not legitimately part of Israel. Israel is for the Palestinians, all of it. Don’t you just love how the anti-Israel protesters decry “occupation,” but what they really want is occupation — by themselves?
Granted, I am about to make some assumptions, but please follow as I parse one of the protester’s statements. He said he was six years old when he saw Israeli police beat up his father, which was his “first memory ever in this world,” he said. “They ended up demolishing my house that day. It was a very traumatic experience.”
Indeed it must have been, but if this person is now an adult, how could he not know why Israel demolishes houses? Rightly or wrongly, this policy is applied to the houses of Palestinian terrorists who murder Israelis. So what are we supposed to think? That this was never explained to this protester? I don’t know which is worse: to say that he never learned that his traumatic childhood experience was prompted by a cold-blooded murder; or to say he was incapable of absorbing a fundamental response of the people he considers his enemy: the right to fight back against cold-blooded murder.
Cold indeed. I have had conversations with Palestinian teens. I have raised the issue of terrorist murder. It simply doesn’t register. It’s not that the teens I spoke with justified terrorist murders, or denied them, or argued that they are less heinous than what they see as the injustices done to them. No, nothing like that.
Terrorist murders of Israelis simply did not go in. Whatever Palestinian terrorists have done is just not part of these teens’ reality.
How is one supposed to make peace if there is no war — if there are no two-sides? If what is done to Israelis does not exist, then the idea of peace is like dividing by zero. It has no reality.
Meanwhile, a couple of miles away from the Manhattan protest, and two weeks earlier, NYU’s Law Students for Justice in Palestine said that the recent murder of Israelis by Palestinian terrorists was “a direct result of the Israeli occupation.” I pull the trigger, but the occupation made me do it.
A group of Jewish law students picked up the implication immediately. They were implicitly threatened. If Palestinians murderers are not responsible for their own lethal violence, but Israeli occupation is, then supporters of Israel are legitimate targets! The law students announced that they would press a formal grievance against the NYU pro-Palestinian law student organization.
In 2020, the US Dept. of Education and NYU reached an agreement to bolster opposition to anti-Semitism on the NYU campus following complaints of “a hostile environment” for Jews there.
The irony drips. NYU comes to an agreement prompted by an alleged “hostile environment” — by words and policies that intimidate pro-Israel Jewish students. NYU focuses on detoxifying an environment even as Palestinian law students focus on justifying lethal action — you know, the “direct result of the Israeli occupation.”
Just in case you thought these anti-Israel protests were all in a day’s work in free-speech America, organizers of the Manhattan protests refused to speak with a reporter from the New York Jewish Week because it is part of the “Zionist media.” Still more: the anti-Israel law students at NYU declared that the “Zionist grip on the media is omnipresent.” So if a Jewish newspaper must be boycotted because it is part of the “Zionist media,” and if the Zionist grip on the media is “omnipresent,” why speak to any media at all, Jewish or otherwise?
This isn’t a matter of closing down someone else’s right of speech, this is closing down one’s own speech.
This isn’t a war over the limits of free speech, this is a war over non-speech. Which is precisely how totalitarianism begins: I only speak to myself. I do not need to speak to anyone else. Only I have the truth.
Just like the Palestinian teen didn’t need to speak to my point.
Just like those who raised him didn’t need to speak to him about Palestinian terrorism.
Beware the totalitarian mentality, emergent not only in parts of Palestine but in parts of Manhattan, right here in the USA.
Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News
