RUTHFULLY YOURS

This past November, the student newspaper at McGill University in Montreal responded to accusations that it had been providing a platform for anti-Semitism. While denying the specific charge, the editors emphatically reasserted their core position—namely, that the student paper “maintains an editorial line of not publishing pieces which promote a Zionist worldview, or any other ideology which we consider oppressive.” http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2017/01/where-israel-advocacy-fails-and-how-it-can-succeed/

This blunt statement is a reminder that hatred of the Jewish state is rapidly becoming the default position on many college campuses. Meanwhile, Israel’s friends, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, are left to ask what, if anything, can be done to stem the rising tide of anti-Israel venom.

In more than five years of involvement in advocacy for Israel, both as a college student and in a professional capacity, I’ve spoken at hundreds of events, worked with dozens of organizations, designed campus programs and social-media campaigns, and advised members of Congress, donors, and even Israeli government officials on how best to advance the cause of the Jewish state. As a member of the “millennial” generation, I have also been privy to the frustrations and complaints of my activist, pro-Israel peers whose own enchantment with the Jewish state is a driving force in their lives and who believe that too much institutional support is going to forms of advocacy that have outlived their usefulness.

Partially in response to these frustrations, I conducted a year-long study of how pro-Israel groups engage millennials. What works? What doesn’t? How to improve? In addressing those questions, I compared the available survey data about the attitudes of young Americans toward the Jewish state with what pro-Israel groups are currently doing to reach them, and conducted hundreds of interviews with students, professors, essayists, and professional activists.

The conclusion I eventually arrived at, presented below in severely boiled-down form, is that some kinds of Israel advocacy are at best of limited effectiveness and at worst can do more harm than good. Yet I also found some approaches that promise significantly greater success.

Let’s startby looking quickly at current attitudes among all Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty. According to several polls taken in the past few decades, most members of this age cohort, while nominally pro-Israel, are largely indifferent to the Jewish state or have no interest at all in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. If asked whether they are more sympathetic to Israel or to the Palestinians, a great many will answer “Israel”—according to a Gallup poll conducted last February. Americans in this age range favor Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 54 to 18 percent—but, when, pressed they make clear their lack of much knowledge about, or devotion to, either side. Evidence suggests, moreover, that this neutral group is the fastest-growing sector of the youth population. Indeed, a survey of California university campuses found that 75 to 95 percent of students fall in this “soft middle.”

These ranks of the unaffiliated and ambivalent are unlikely to be engaged by traditional methods of advocacy; they won’t come to hear a pro-Israel speaker or read a pamphlet about how the peace process is being held back by Palestinian, not Israeli, leaders, or about Hamas’s hate-filled intentions and ideology. Indeed, there’s reason to believe that, among those not already interested in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, discussion of it tends less to inspire curiosity than to induce apathy. To these onlookers, the situation appears too messy and too complicated to lend itself to any obvious solution; the good guys and bad guys aren’t easily identifiable; and meanwhile the rhetoric of partisans on both sides seems angry, obsessive, and overheated.
Not even the most carefully crafted and well-articulated pro-Israel arguments can dispel these impressions. Indeed, among young Jews in particular, the sociologist Theodore Sasson has observed that, when it comes to Israel, they tend to be positively turned off by the compulsive fixation on “the conflict” displayed by most American Jewish institutions.

And yet herein,precisely, lies the challenge: how to encourage support for Israel among those who may tell pollsters they are already pro-Israel but are generally apathetic, and among those who are entirely without an opinion. How to reach them? What, in particular,have Israel-advocacy groups been doing in this regard? Is any of it effective?

For purposes of this brief essay, I’ve divided these pro-Israel groups into two types—builders and defenders—and I’ll cite two or three exemplars of each type.

Birthright, founded in 1999 to “strengthen Jewish identity” and create “solidarity with Israel,” primarily by sending Jews aged eighteen to twenty-six on three-week trips to the Jewish state, is a paradigmatic builder. Its purpose is to foster a sense of affection for Israel, both as an end in itself and, even more, as a means of forging a stronger commitment to Judaism and the Jewish community.

Another builder, of more recent vintage, is the Hasbara Fellowship, which differs from Birthright in recruiting both Jews and non-Jews. Its recent activities, all conceived by students and young professionals, include bringing Israeli technology fairs to campuses where companies can showcase their work and encourage students to apply for jobs and internships. Beyond merely highlighting Israeli technical and entrepreneurial ingenuity, this approach offers something of palpable value to students.

The murderous legacy and personality of Yahya Ayyash, a Hamas mass murderer who masterminded a wave of suicide bombings, are being glorified not only by his Hamas supporters, but also by the “moderate” Western-funded Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

Ayyash won his reputation on the murdering and maiming of hundreds of Israelis, most of them innocent civilians. Had he fought for peace and coexistence, Ayyash would have been condemned as a “traitor” and gone down in history as a “defeatist” and “surrenderist.”

“The mosque that produced the mujahed [warrior] Ayyash is continuing to produce heroes.” – Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is in these mosques that Ayyash was taught that Islam permits people like him to build bombs and dispatch suicide bombers to blow up buses. It is also in these mosques where he was taught that devout Muslims are best engaged in spilling Jewish blood.

Children and youths who attend prayers at these mosques are being fed the same hate-speech rhetoric that their hero Ayyash was exposed to in his childhood. Hence it is no surprise that the mosques in the West Bank and Gaza Strip continue to this day to churn out new terrorists, many of whom aspire to become like Ayyash – mass murderers.

Thus, despite Fatah’s double-talk about a two-state solution and “peace” with Israel, mass murderers still take top billing in its hall of fame. Fatah is also making it known that its former leader, Yasser Arafat, approved of such terrorism against Israel.

The voices of the Palestinians who reject this education for wholesale slaughter are being marginalized by the European leaders doing business with the still-wealthy members of the Arab elite who fund these imams and these mosques.

These European leaders wrongly image that if they get rid of Israel, it will be only Israel. They fail see that Israel is just the first course. They imagine that if they accede to Muslims’ wishes, they will be safe. What they fail to see, as in France, Germany, Sweden, Belgium and Britain, is that they will be next.

Palestinian youths are being urged to follow in the footsteps of Yahya Ayyash, a Hamas mass murderer who masterminded a wave of suicide bombings that killed and wounded hundreds of Israelis. Ayyash’s expertise in manufacturing explosive devices earned him the nickname “The Engineer” and turned him into a hero in the eyes of many Palestinians. The bomb-maker was killed by Israeli security forces on January 5, 1996, thereby ending one of the bloodiest chapters of Palestinian terrorism against Israel.

Two decades later, this arch-terrorist is still being revered as a hero and martyr. His murderous legacy and personality are being glorified not only by his Hamas supporters, but also by the “moderate” Western-funded Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

A few years ago, the PA decided to honor Ayyash by naming a street in Ramallah after him. The street sign was posted in Ramallah, the headquarters of the PA where Abbas lives and works, and reads:

“Yahya Ayyash, 1966-1996, born in Nablus, studied electrical engineering in Bir Zeit University. Was a member of the (Hamas military wing) Iz ad-Din al-Qassam, and was linked by Israel to a number of bombings. He was assassinated by Israel in his Beit Lahia (Gaza Strip) home on January 5, 1996.”

This week, Palestinians took to social media to glorify the arch-terrorist further, depicting him as a role model and urging youths to follow in his footsteps.

If international law is law in the ordinary sense of the term—and not moral posturing, political maneuvering, or personal payback—then it must comprise settled and public requirements, effective and even-handed implementation, and impartial resolution of disputes. The Obama administration’s scandalous decision not to veto U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334 last month suggests that international law at the United Nations is not law in the ordinary sense of the term.

Endorsed by the council’s other 14 members, Resolution 2334 condemns Israeli settlement policy as “a flagrant violation under international law” and recognizes all territory east of “the 4 June 1967 lines” (or the Green Line as it is sometimes called) as lawfully belonging to the Palestinians. The sanctimonious but shoddy justifications that leading U.S. officials have offered — in what appears to have been a well-orchestrated public relations campaign — reinforce the conclusion that the United Nations and its Obama-administration enablers were bent on punishing Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the process they have accelerated the delegitimization of international law.

Addressing the Security Council to explain America’s abstention, Ambassador Samantha Power stated, “Our vote today is fully in line with the bipartisan history of how American presidents have approached both the issue—and the role of this body.” That’s false.

While previous administrations have criticized settlements as bad policy, it is the Obama administration that deviates from longstanding American practice by maintaining that every last inch of the West Bank—the territory beyond the Green Line held by Jordan on the eve of the June 1967 Six-Day War—is lawfully Palestinian land. In the very 1982 address on the Middle East that Power cites in defense of Resolution 2334, President Reagan declared, “In the pre-1967 borders, Israel was barely 10 miles wide at its narrowest point. The bulk of Israel’s population lived within artillery range of hostile Arab armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again.”

Moreover, the peace agreement that President Clinton negotiated at the July 2000 Camp David summit—accepted by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and rejected by Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat—as well as the December 2000 Clinton parameters envisaged Israel retaining control of population centers beyond the Green Line. So did President George W. Bush’s 2004 letter of understanding to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, which explicitly rejected a return to the 1967 lines.

Power is wrong on legal grounds as well as on security and historical ones. The Green Line is the 1949 armistice line to which Israel and Jordan agreed to end the war begun by five Arab armies invading Israel after it declared independence on the expiration of the British Mandate in May 1948. The armistice lines have no inherent legal significance. Indeed, U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338—the former passed following the 1967 war and the latter enacted after the 1973 Yom Kippur War—both recognized that the 1949 lines were not sacrosanct. Both provided for Israel to relinquish control of some portion, perhaps a large portion, of the land it seized from Jordan (and Syria and Egypt) in 1967 in exchange for security and peace.

On Sunday evening, when the details of the allegedly Islamic State-inspired truck-‎ramming attack in Jerusalem that afternoon were beginning to take shape, I received a ‎phone call from a friend in distress.‎

Unlike so many of our peers that day, neither she nor I had been directly affected by the ‎terrorist atrocity, in which an IDF officer and three officers’ course cadets were murdered and another ‎‎15 wounded. And she was not suffering from a common form of anxiety experienced ‎when the loved ones of others are killed or injured.‎

‎”I have had it with leftists,” she said.‎

Since she is not exactly a rabid right-winger herself — and though I was deeply upset by ‎the tragedy I had just spent hours reading and writing about — I laughed. What, I ‎wondered, brought this on?‎

She told me that she first learned of the attack from a mutual friend whom she ‎encountered while out running errands.‎

‎”The blood of the victims wasn’t even dry yet, and the only thing that woman had to say ‎was, ‘It’s so awful; now Bibi will go up in the polls.'”‎

Again I chuckled, this time at my friend’s naive outrage at something I have come to take ‎for granted: Whenever something bad happens, including a rainstorm at an outdoor ‎wedding, blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and bemoan his electoral popularity.‎

But it is not only members of the Israeli Left who respond to every ill that befalls the ‎Jewish state by bashing it and its leaders. My compatriots on the Right have a similar ‎tendency, albeit from the opposite point of view.‎

Sunday’s attack gave expression to the latest example of this phenomenon on both sides ‎of the political spectrum.‎

To understand the way Israelis — as all human beings — automatically translate every ‎event into the language of their ideology, one has to review the facts of the truck-‎ramming, as they have unfolded, based on security camera footage, eyewitness accounts ‎and other evidence collected at the scene.‎

At approximately 1:30 p.m., a large group of cadets on a weekly educational outing that ‎is part of their training to become officers arrived at the Armon Hanatziv promenade and ‎began to disembark from their buses.‎

The two-state solution, a perverse euphemism for carving an Islamic terror state out of the land of Israel and the living flesh of her people, is in trouble. The solution, which has solved nothing except the shortage of graves in Israel and Muslim terrorists in the Middle East, is the object of grave concern by the professionally concerned from Foggy Bottom to Fifth Avenue.

Obama set up his betrayal of Israel at the UN to “save” the two-state solution from Trump. The media warns that David Friedman, Trump’s pick for ambassador, is so pro-Israel that he’ll kill the “solution.”

But you can’t kill something that was never alive.

The two-state solution is a zombie. It can’t be dead because it never lived. It was a rotting shambling corpse of a diplomatic process. If you stood downwind of the proceedings, it looked alive.

Up close there was only blood and death.

Like the Holy Roman Empire, the two-state solution didn’t solve anything and it wasn’t in the business of creating two states. Not unless you count a Hamas state in Gaza and a Fatah state in the West Bank.

What problem was the two-state solution solving?

It wasn’t the problem of terrorism. Turning over land, weapons and power to a bunch of terrorists made for more terrorism. It’s no coincidence that Islamic terrorism worldwide shot up around the same time.

The consequences of giving terrorists their own country to play with were as predictable as taking a power drill to the bottom of a boat or running a toaster in a bubble bath. The least likely outcome of handing guns to homicidal sociopaths was peace. The most likely was murder. And that was as intended.

The problem that the two-state solution was solving was the existence of Israel; the Jewish Problem.

Spray the two-state solution over an irritating country full of Jews who managed to survive multiple Muslim genocides. Apply and wait for as long as it takes until the Jewish Problem is solved again.

President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem provides a timely opportunity for the new president to make a sharp break with President Barack Obama’s unwise, unjustified and ultimately ineffective hostility toward America’s closest ally in the turbulent Middle East.

Especially after Obama’s recent decision to abstain from, rather than veto, U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, which condemned Israeli settlements in absurdly one-sided terms, moving the embassy would send a strong signal to Israel, the region and the world that the United States will once again stand by its allies.

Predictably, critics worry that such a provocative move could have catastrophic effects that include inciting more Palestinian violence, dooming Israeli-Palestinian peace, inflaming the “Arab street” and threatening Israel’s growing private ties to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other Arab nations.