U.S. President Donald Trump asked the governments of Egypt and Jordan to take in Gazans so the repair of the region could be expedited. Trump acknowledged that Jordan already had many Arabs who had come from Palestine in the country – over half the country’s population, including the king of Jordan’s wife – but “I said to him that I’d love you to take on more, because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now and it’s a mess, it’s a real mess…. I don’t know, something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change.”
Jordan has a large Palestinian Arab population because it invaded Israel in 1948 and ethnically cleansed Jews from the west bank of the Jordan River all the way through the Old City of Jerusalem. It then illegally annexed that region in 1950 and granted all Arabs – specifically excluding Jews – Jordanian citizenship in 1954.
Statements by Egypt and Jordan dismissed Trump’s suggestion. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said that “the deportation or displacement of the Palestinian people is an injustice in which we cannot participate.” The Jordanian monarch made similar comments.
Social media lit up as well. As hundreds of thousands of Gazans moved back to their towns in northern Gaza, The call of “return!” was echoed.
It’s a strange dynamic. The United Nations and its arm in the region, UNRWA, has insisted that 73% of Gazans do NOT belong in Gaza but in towns inside of Israel where grandparents left during their war to destroy the Jewish State in 1948. Yet now they insist that these same Arabs cannot be dislodged from Gaza, after they got decimated in a war initiated by their government.
The victim mentality is such an ingrained deformity in Palestinian Arab culture (courtesy of the United Nations), that attempts to efficiently rebuild infrastructure is met with the same tired complaint of “ethnic cleansing” as a “displacement plan” rather than a rebuilding plan.
Now is the time for Gazans to internalize that Gaza is their home, not Israel, as a condition to taking billions of dollars in aid in global charity.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) aged 66, questioned a young Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), aged 40, during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee vetting process for the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. It’s a short five-minute video and worth watching the entire exchange.
At 1:07, Van Hollen pointed his questions to adhering to UN Security Council resolutions and tied it to the Israeli-Arab conflict. Van Hollen said “long term peace must include security, self-determination and dignity for Israelis and Palestinian alike,” and added that “we should stand up and protect universal human rights and self-determination for all people, including both Israelis and Palestinians.”
He questioned Stefanik’s contention that Jews have a “Biblical right” to the land of Israel, and concluded his remarks at 4:59 by mansplaining that “when it comes to this very difficult issue [Jews living and praying in the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem], if the president is going to succeed at bringing peace and stability to the Middle East, we’re going to have to look at the UN Security Council resolutions – not just the ones on Lebanon, which we should enforce – but other UN Security Council resolutions [implying UNSC 2334], and it’s going to be very difficult to achieve that if you continue to hold the view that you just expressed [that Jews have a right to live and pray in Jerusalem and the West Bank], which is a view that was not held by the founders of the State of Israel who were secular Zionists, not religious Zionists.”
Some education is in order for this senator who airs his ignorance and Palestinian Arabs’ false propaganda so publicly:
David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and secular Zionist said to the British authorities in January 1937 before the Peel Commission which discussed limiting Jews to certain areas of Palestine that “Our right to the Land of Israel does not stem from the Mandate and the Balfour Declaration. It precedes those. The Bible is our mandate… I can state in the name of the Jewish People: The Bible is our mandate, the Bible that was written by us in our Hebrew language, and in this land itself, is our mandate. Our historical right has existed since our beginnings as the Jewish People, and the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate recognize and confirm that right.” The secular Zionist Ben Gurion explicitly tied the right of Jews in the land to the Bible.
Ben Gurion referenced the original Hebrew language of the Bible, which became and remains the official language of the Jewish State, the only country which speaks in the biblical tongue.
When Ben Gurion read Israel’s Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948 which he helped draft, the first lines were “ERETZ-ISRAEL [(Hebrew) – The Land of Israel] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.” The “land of Israel” encompasses the entire Jewish Promised Land, not new borders concocted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1947.
David Ben Gurion declaring the State of Israel on May 14, 1948
Further, Van Hollen fails to comprehend that his various statements do not complement each other but CONTRADICT each other. One cannot adhere to every UN Security Council resolution and simultaneously respect the dignity and human rights of Jews.
UNSC 2334, which passed in the waning days of the Obama administration, tramples on basic human rights and dignity of Jews by denying their right to live and pray in their holiest location in the Old City of Jerusalem.
If the basic parameters of Palestinian dignity is to deny Jewish dignity, then there is no scenario in which there is “dignity for Israelis and Palestinians alike” which Van Hollen ignores.
The United Nations is deeply broken and amoral, yet Senator Van Hollen seeks to prop it up as something holy, a pagan temple amongst the socialist-jihadi alliance. Rep. Elise Stefanik intends to act like the Jewish patriarch Abraham when she enters the United Nations, who shattered the false idols in his father’s store. She is poised to enter that dark chamber and shed light on its systemic depravity.
Representative Elise Stefanik at her Senate confirmation hearing. (Photo: Tom Brenner for The New York Times)
Abraham’s actions 3,700 years ago launched monotheism. Perhaps the end of the United Nations’ sacred cows will usher in a period when Jews and Judaism will be openly and widely recognized on the Temple Mount and throughout Jerusalem.
ACTION ITEM
Contact Sen. Van Hollen’s office and let him know what you think of his comments. Feel free to send this article. DC phone: (202) 224-4654. Contact your representatives as well.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Over the 2025 Martin Luther King holiday weekend, three Israeli women who had been held in captivity for 471 days by Palestinian Arab terrorists, were released in exchange for 90 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. As the Red Cross came to collect the three women, armed Hamas soldiers climbed atop the Red Cross vehicles to incite the Gazan mobs who had converged on the scene.
Mobs in Gaza surround Red Cross trucks carrying Israeli women
The parade of masked terrorists led The New York Times to comment that Hamas was still “standing”, albeit weakened and isolated, as the “dominant Palestinian power in Gaza.”
The official Palestinian Authority daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, was not as generous the Times. It mocked the members of Hamas who wore civilian clothes during fifteen months of war hiding amongst women and children, who suddenly donned military uniforms once Israel signed onto a ceasefire:
“When shame ends, only insolence remains. For 15 months of harsh war, Hamas did not dare to show even one of its operatives in military uniforms (!!), but when the ceasefire agreement stipulated that the cannons be silenced, Hamas brought out its operatives in military uniforms – not only for display purposes, but also to fabricate a victory narrative!”
“Victory?” Israel has never been stronger relative to all the countries in the Middle East. Hamas is only powerful relative to the decimated Palestinians.
If the “last man standing” is only relative to YOUR OWN SIDE, then your military foe was never really the opponent. The actions were performance art, a spectacle of battered women and children wavering being sadism and masochism, aired for an antisemitic audience whom Hamas hoped would actually do the fighting against the Jews.
Hamas launched a war with genocidal intent and then hid underground with civilian hostages as well as disguised amongst civilians, only to emerge “standing” atop humanitarian trucks carrying a few female hostages.
After fifteen months of hiding, leaving women and children to bare the brunt of Israeli fire, the armed cowards of Hamas came out once the gunfire had been silenced to wave their arms as “victors” before thousands of Gazans who had watched their own lives being destroyed.
MLK once said “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” The measure of Hamas, the ruling power in Gaza is depraved, cruel and cowardly. That “support for Hamas remains the highest compared to all Palestinian factions” according to the most recent Palestinian poll, marks the Palestinian society as integrally complicit and wicked.
On January 19, 2025, three young Israeli women who were held in captivity in Gaza for 471 days were released in exchange for 90 Palestinian Arabs held in Israel. Among those Arabs were Khalida Jarrar, a convicted member of the Palestinian terrorist group, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who was involved in several plane hijackings; Nawal Abed Fatiha, who stabbed a 70-year-old Israeli man in a 2020 attack in Jerusalem; and Ibrahim Zamar, who shot two people near the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in 2023.
The gross inequality of the exchange in QUANTITY (but not quality) raised the eyebrows of the media, questioning the thirty-to-one ratio of people, while ignoring the equivalization of civilian women torn from their homes to convicted terrorists.
New York Times noting the “uneven exchange” of numbers while minimizing the qualitative difference of civilians for terrorists
But that is the story of the Middle East.
The Jewish State, is a liberal democracy which is roughly 76% Jewish, with 7.2 million Jews. It sits amongst 450 million Muslims in its immediate vicinity (about 62 times as many Muslims as Jews), in countries which are autocracies and almost completely Islamic. Just past those neighbors are another 500 million Muslims, some of whom have called Israel a “cancer” which must be removed from the planet.
The Israeli women who were freed – Romi Gonen (24), Doron Steinbrecher (31) and Emily Damari (28) – were simply living their lives when an estimated 3,000 Palestinian Arabs from Gaza stormed into Israel, killing their friends, family and pets, and then abducted them. That is in sharp contrast to the Palestinian Arab terrorists released by Israel who were waging a war of ethnic cleansing to rid the region of Jews when they were taken prisoners.
The media’s framing of the story whitewashes the difference in the nature of the exchange of innocents for criminals, asserting that they were just “accused of terrorism.” It calls out the numerical difference as rational, even while it vilifies Israel for the difference in the number of dead in the Hamas-initiated war.
New York Times describing Palestinian prisoners as simply “accused of terrorism”
The qualitative symbol of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is Neta Sorek, a Jewish feminist peace activist slaughtered by Palestinian terrorists as she walked in a forest in 2010. The quantitative symbol of the broader Jewish-Muslim Conflict in the Middle East is the grossly uneven exchange of 2025.
As the ceasefire between Palestinian terrorists and Israel begins today, the 2.2 million stateless Arabs (SAPs) in Gaza are clamoring for support. They seek to return to homes and rebuild neighborhoods. They seek food, clean water, and medications that were difficult to obtain when Arab gangs looted supplies during the war.
The United Nations has long maintained that its agency, UNRWA, is the sole group that can address the needs as a humanitarian organization with established operations in the strip for decades.
But UNRWA’s mission is NOT to care for Gazans but only a subset of them; those who are descendants of Arabs who left Israel in 1948. The SAPs who are descendants of people who have long-lived in Gaza (whose grandparents didn’t move there in 1948) are not entitled to UNRWA’s largess.
Do non-“refugees descendants” have to stay hungry? Do they have to pay to rebuild their homes while they watch their neighbors’ houses get rebuilt with global donations? Will aid organizations build houses only for “refugee descendants” and leave other Gaza residents to fend for themselves?
Around 73% of Gazans are entitled to services from UNRWA, according to UNRWA in December 2020. Is the United Nations planning on ignoring the needs of the other 27%? Had UNRWA’s Gazan wards only accounted for 10% of the population, would the situation be different whereby the UN would not profess unique capabilities and not attempt to swoop in to address all of Gaza?
The UN has deliberately deceived the world to imagining that all Gazans – indeed all Palestinians – are refugees, entitled to global support. It uses “Palestinians”, “refugees” and “Gazans” interchangeably, in an attempt to continue to expand and extend its mandate, even though it was always conceived as a temporary agency with finite tasks. At this moment in time, it is advancing a power grab despite its gross and institutionalized failures.
UNRWA has long abused its mandate, and this is a moment to allow a different organization to address the humanitarian needs of ALL Gazans, not just UNRWA wards, and permanently shut down UNRWA in Gaza. Whichever group assumes governance of Gaza – perhaps a Palestinian Authority stripped of all members of Hamas in its parliament – should assume control of reconstruction efforts.
The signing of a ceasefire agreement in January 2025 must have been welcomed news for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Over the past fifteen months, it has watched its various proxies in the region get decimated.
Hamas’s leadership was killed and a majority of its fighters killed, injured, or captured, while Gaza has been largely destroyed.
Hezbollah’s military was soundly defeated, its leader killed, and a new non-Hezbollah aligned Lebanese president was elected.
Syria’s Iranian-backed government was routed, and the country’s armaments were destroyed.
And Iran’s defensive capabilities were eliminated by Israeli attacks, after Iran launched hundreds of missiles at Israel which caused little damage.
Over the course of the Iranian Proxies – Israel War which started on October 7, 2023, Iran went from being a regional power to an impotent joke. The ceasefire was really a call for the “mercy rule” in which one party was so decisively decimating the counterparty that third parties jumped in to save the stubborn vanquished from complete annihilation.
And yet.
The delusion of unique heavenly blessings have deeply intoxicated and blinded radical Islamic jihadi rulers. The chief cleric of Iran, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei praised the resistance of the Palestinian people” and defeat of the “Zionist regime” upon the announcement of the ceasefire. He fashions himself “leader of the Islamic Revolution,” not just in Iran but around the world, to defeat infidels everywhere.
Much like Monty Python’s delusional defeated Black Knight in the film Holy Grail, the deranged leader cannot admit his utter defeat, and yells as the world passes by.
The lunatic had company.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guards said “The end of the war and the imposition of a ceasefire… is a clear victory and a great victory for Palestine and a bigger defeat for the monstrous Zionist regime.”
Hamas’s Khalil al-Hayya said “The ceasefire agreement is the result of the legendary steadfastness of our great Palestinian people and our valiant resistance in the Gaza Strip over the course of more than 15 month. The agreement to halt the aggression on Gaza is an achievement for our people, our resistance, our nation, and the free people of the world. It marks a pivotal stage in the ongoing struggle against the enemy, paving the way toward achieving our people’s goals of liberation and return.”
The Palestine Chronicle tried to rewrite history that there were “Global celebrations” for the “Victory of the Resistance.”
In the United States, Nerdeen Kiswani, the leader of Within Our Lifetime wrote on X that “Gaza has won, Palestine has won, resistance has won. Imperialism and Zionism has lost,” and then threatened the United States.
There is no negotiation possible with such lunacy. It is probable that the Iranian nuclear program must be destroyed with impunity rather than dismantled with discussions in the global community.
The sad truth is that radical jihadists who despise Jews are in the majority of the Middle East, as shown in repeated ADL polls. Coexistence will only be a reality under the “wings of democracy,” with jihadi groups and countries stripped of weaponry and capabilities to destroy religious pluralism.
On the heels of such actions in the international arena, Hamas’s normalization of mass-scale atrocities and rank antisemitic genocidal aspirations must be forever quashed in the holy land. Therefore, the United States should greenlight Israel’s development of the area known as “E1” just east of Jerusalem, all the way until the town of Ma’ale Adumim.
The region has gone through many paradigm shifts since the end of the Ottoman Empire. The October 7, 2023 massacre by thousands of Palestinian Arab terrorists, the support for the terrorists, their aims, and their continued insistence on perpetuating the war by not surrendering the hostages is another reminder that the end of the conflict will require the decimation of the terrorists and guardrails against an ability to accomplish their objectives.
The “Al Aqsa Flood’ in which the genocidal jihadists sought to ethnically cleanse Jews from their holiest city could be extinguished with the building of homes throughout E1, protecting Jerusalem from malevolent actors.
Jerusalem as seen from Hebrew University (photo: First One Through)
When President-elect Donald Trump announced that “hell will break out” if Hamas doesn’t return the hostages that it brutally seized from Israel, this site pondered whether the Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority and Hamas-affiliated-UNRWA will be targets of the United States. It stands to reason that the media companies and sites of Qatar-owned Al Jazeera and Palestinian run-Wafa should be shut down in the United States under the same principle.
Al Jazeera has long been a mouthpiece of Hamas. Saudi Arabia shut down the media operations in 2017 stating that “the move comes after Al Jazeera promoted the plots of terrorist groups, supported the Houthi militias in Yemen, and tried to break internal ranks with Saudi Arabia by and harming its sovereignty.” Israel decided to shutter AJ’s operations in May 2024, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying “the incitement channel Al Jazeera will be closed in Israel.” Even the Palestinian Authority, perhaps looking to curry favor from the incoming Trump administration, decided last week to shut down Al Jazeera in the West Bank.
Al Jazeera has been fanning the flames of antisemitism in the Muslim world for years, claiming that Jews are “storming” the Al Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem. This is an echo of the Palestinian news site Wafa which continues to attempt to enlist the Muslim world to demand a Jew-free Temple Mount. The New York Times picks up on the propaganda and spreads it to its global liberal readers, cementing the socialist-jihadi alliance.
Even today, Wafa calls all Jews who are in Israel “colonists” who “storm the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque”, just by visiting Judaism’s holiest site, insisting that the only worshipers be Muslim.
It is highly probable that Trump will reverse course of the Biden administration, and ban Al Jazeera from the White House briefings. It will be interesting to see if the ban will cover all U.S. operations, and extend to Palestinian media as well.
President-elect Donald Trump issued a warning to the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas to release the 101 hostages it stole from Israel on October 7, 2023, or “all hell will break out” for them and the region. He would not comment further on what that meant for Hamas or its allies but reiterated that it would be severe.
Below are some thoughts on what actions the Trump administration might take, which fall into two principal categories: military and non-military.
Military
Trump’s first term in office did not see much activity in the way of American forces and action. While he did increase spending for the military over the Obama administration, his actual use of force was targeted and limited to particular strikes, such as the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and missile strikes on Syria for using chemical weapons. It is possible that Trump would order targeted attacks on Hamas operatives as well.
The general argument against this is that Israel has already pulverized Hamas in Gaza and there is little else that the U.S. could do. That is not true.
The United States has several things that Israel doesn’t have: massive bombs; incremental intelligence; and global influence.
At various points of the Hamas-initiated war, the Biden administration withheld some armaments to Israel, fearing it would harm civilians. Those bombs and other tools of warfare could be used against Hamas and its allies. Hezbollah tunnels in Lebanon and Iran’s nuclear program could be eviscerated with advanced weaponry, whether given to and launched by Israel or used by American forces directly.
U.S. intelligence and reach spans beyond the immediate actors. One of Hamas’s leaders, Khaled Mashal lives openly in Qatar, where the US has its largest military base in the Middle East. The Trump administration may give Qatar the option of green-lighting the elimination of Mashal and his associates or watch the US move its over 10,000-person force to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as the administration advances the Abraham Accords with a normalization agreement between Israel and KSA.
Non-military
The United States power can bring the world to pressure Hamas through political, economic and judicial actions. This is the opposite approach of the Biden administration and the world which put pressure on Israel to the detriment of the hostages. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted as much that “every time we put pressure on Israel, Hamas backed off from the hostage deal.”
The initiatives start with a simple order: label every government, agency, business or person associated with Hamas a terrorist entity.
The Palestinian Authority‘s parliament, the Palestinian Legislative Council, is led by Hamas. The PA would immediately become a designated terrorist group unless it fires every member of Hamas. All members of the PA would be subject to arrest and no organization would be permitted to send material support to the PA. Every US charity that sends money to the PA would lose tax-exempt status and/or be shut down.
The United Nations considers Hamas a legitimate political Palestinian party and its main agency in the region, UNRWA, closely coordinates with Hamas. UNRWA offices in the United States would be closed and the US would push allies to similarly halt funding to UNRWA and close its offices. UNRWA would not only lose all US funding and standing, but possibly the United Nations as well, if the organization continues to legitimize Hamas.
In addition to the “axis of resistance” of the Iranian proxies already on the terrorist list, Qatar and Turkey would be forced to chose between the United States and Hamas. Each would see its economies and regional aspirations quickly collapse should they side with terrorists. Ramifications could include not only moving all US assets out of Qatar to Saudi Arabia, but also supporting Israel and Cyprus to all energy claims in the Mediterranean Sea which Turkey covets.
In the United States, people who provide material support to not just Hamas, but the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA would be committing a criminal act. People would go to jail for up to 20 years or be deported. Entire groups, or perhaps just senior leadership of organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, Students for Justice in Palestine and others could be impacted, depending on their level of support.
In April 2024, Congress enacted the Hamas and Other Palestinian Terrorist Groups International Financing Prevention Act which requires the executive branch to impose sanctions on foreign states or persons that provide certain types of support to Hamas, and other Palestinian terrorist groups. Trump’s version of “hell” for Hamas supporters will be to not only enforce the will of Congress but to expand its targets by capturing the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA as Hamas affiliates.
Henri Dunant (1828-1910) was a humanitarian who created the International Red Cross in 1863 which helped lead to his selection as the first winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. He is also known (although such mention has been stripped from Wikipedia) for being a strong Christian Zionist, as far back as 1866 when he advocated for “the re-settlement of Palestine by the Jewish people.” His advocacy led Theodore Herzl to invite him to the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.
The dream of Jews returning to their homeland gathered momentum in the second half of the 19th century, despite the Ottomans making it hard for Jews to move to Palestine. In 1800, Jews made up about 3% of the region of Palestine, growing to 8% by 1882 and nearly 14% by the close of the Ottoman period in 1914.
Jews have moved to the land of Israel in far greater percentages than either Christians or Muslims since 1800
This predated the Balfour Declaration of 1917, when the British government appreciated the Zionist Federation’s appeal to reestablish their national home in Palestine.
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
Despite Zionism being about the GOAL of creating a Jewish national home in Jews’ historic homeland, the term continues to be used decades after the modern State of Israel was established in 1948.
Gil Troy, a historian and author of “The Zionist Ideas,” explained that Zionism has three principle components: that Jews are a nation; that Jews have ties to their particular homeland in the land of Israel; and that Jews have a right to establish a state in that homeland, much like other people have rights to their own country. The first two principles are simple facts while the third is a matter of rights, not aspirations. Such definition makes Zionism an ongoing principle rather than that a mission which was accomplished in 1948.
Pro-Israel books using “Zionist”
The view of Zionism as a relevant reality or historical ideology arises in the national anthem, “Hatikvah”, written in 1877 as the Zionist movement gathered initial momentum.
“As long as within our hearts / The Jewish soul sings, / As long as forward to the East / To Zion, looks the eye / Our hope is not yet lost, / It is two thousand years old, / To be a free people in our land / The land of Zion and Jerusalem”
Today, some object to the lyrics speaking of Israel from a purely Jewish perspective when 25% of the population is not Jewish. Others do not like the fact that it has no religious foundation and only speaks of being “free” in the land. I would add that the text is inherently dated with words like “our HOPE” and “TO BE a free people” when Israel has long been a reality.
Israeli flag at the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)
Significantly, discussions around “Zionism” have continued in political fora as if the world is still debating the FORMATION of Israel.
In November 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Res. 3379 which stated “zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” by lumping it into a category of trespasses including “colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, apartheid and racial discrimination.” The resolution was rescinded in 1991 through the efforts of the United States.
Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general and one-time member of Congress once said “Zionism, the ideological undergirding of Israel, is a debatable political philosophy,” making the foundation of the Jewish State a questionable endeavor.
Linda Sarsour, a member of the anti-Israel Democratic Socialists of America said that “nothing is creepier than Zionism,” invoking the old UN resolution that Zionism is a form of racism.
Steve Erlander wrote in The New York Times that “Zionism was never the gentlest of ideologies. The return of the Jewish people to their biblical homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty there have always carried within them the displacement of those already living in the land,” repeating the stale U.N. slander.
Israel’s enemies continue to call it a “Zionist entity”, refusing to mention the name of the country, as if to do so recognizes its existence or right to exist.
The continued use of the word “Zionism” today by anti-Israel agitators is not a theoretical review of Jewish aspirations to return to their homeland in the 19th century and early 20th century, but a concerted effort to demonize and/or destroy Israel today.
For starters, by attempting to define Zionism as a form of racism, people mark Israel as a racist and apartheid state regardless of its actions. While it is the most liberal country in the entire Middle East, if Israel’s underpinning ideology was built on “colonialism” and “racial discrimination,” then its existence is a continuation of the racist ideology, permeated by original sin.
Secondly, if Israel is not viewed as a functioning liberal and democratic reality but merely a vehicle of “Zionism,” its existence entails the continued “displacement of those [Arabs] already living in the land.” When Rep. Rashida Tlaib introduced a resolution in Congress about the “Ongoing Nakba,” she was not discussing 1948 history but a belief in the “ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians for illegal settlements.” She imagines the entire history and ongoing reality of the reestablished Jewish State as a “catastrophe.”
Further, anti-Israel people believe that when JEWS use of the word “Zionism,” it means that the goals of the Jewish State are far from completed. Not only does Israel seek the land east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL/ “West Bank”) and Gaza, but it seeks “Greater Israel” encompassing “the area from the Nile to the Euphrates,” as speakers at the United Nations contend. It means Jews want to see a third Temple built on the Temple Mount in place of the Dome of the Rock.
In short, when anti-Israel people use the term “Zionism,” they are discussing more than a philosophy but an evolving reality. Anti-Israel activists seek a future which resembles 1947 or 1917, when there was no Israel and no international support for a Jewish State. When those same people hear Jews use “Zionism,” they believe that Jews want a future which looks like 2,000-plus years ago, with a Jewish Temple and sprawling Jewish kingdom.
In other words, Zionism is not just a highly charged word for some, but conjures up the perception of ongoing goals as opposed to actual present facts.
The facts are that Israel is the most pluralistic society in the Middle East where Arabs have more rights and a higher standard of living than in neighboring Arab countries. Israel has shown its willingness to SHRINK its borders for peace. Israel has proven that it can create a viable, functioning economy and society, despite regional actors refusing to accept its existence.
The plain truth is that Israel is a model state to be replicated, while cast as a Zionist ideology to be terminated.
Zionism was a dream and Israel exists. The transition was marked in the last line in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, “the realization of the age-old dream – the redemption of Israel.” Israel supporters should acknowledge Israel’s declaration and stop calling themselves “Zionists” as it enables anti-Israel fanatics to whitewash their desire to destroy the Jewish State.
A proud “Zionist” woman at the Celebrate Israel parade in New York City in 2019 (photo: First One Through)
People are pro-Israel, anti-Israel or Israel-ambivalent today. Do not let those who seek the destruction of Israel to hide behind a “debate” about the “political philosophy” of Zionism.
First One Through 