Left’s miseducation on the Jewish state rooted in falsehoods and blatant bigotry
School’s out for summer, but when it comes to Israel, New York’s students still have a lot of learning to do.
Last month, CUNY Law School made headlines for a commencement speech that, even by the scurrilous standards of the rabid anti-Israel left, sounded shockingly like a blood libel, accusing the Jewish state of crimes against humanity.
In the wake of criticism, the speaker, Fatima Mousa Mohammed, has doubled down on her statements. “I would say it louder,” she said, even as the CUNY Board of Regents labeled it “hate speech.”
Elsewhere in the city’s vaunted university system, CUNY’s faculty have been waltzing with Israel hatred for years, passing resolution after resolution condemning the Jewish state.
From the city’s public schools to its private institutions, the woke progressives are busy telling a maliciously distorted story that portrays Israel as a singular benighted villain.
So, while no one enjoys summer school, no one should suffer bigoted propaganda dressed up as education either.
Here, then, is a brief crash course in what actually goes on in the world’s most promised land:
•Israel is the indigenous homeland of the Jewish people
From archaeological findings to scientific analyses of artifacts, from biblical tales to historical accounts, from DNA tests to census records, every imaginable bit of evidence tells precisely the same story, that of Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel, being the native homeland of the Jews.
King Solomon built his ancient Temple for the Jews in Jerusalem in 957 B.C., roughly a millennium before Jesus was born and 1,500 years before the birth of Islam.
A small nation contending with a parade of empires eager to vanquish and replace it, the Jews were eventually forced into exile after the Romans burned the Second Temple in 70 A.D.
But there has always been ongoing Jewish life in Israel, even under a foreign yoke, and those forced to live elsewhere continued to pray thrice daily for centuries in the direction of Jerusalem, yearning for their return home.
None of this, of course, negates the Arabs’ claim that they, too, are the land’s native sons, but it is absurd to call the Jews foreign usurpers or colonizers.
•Zionism is a Jewish Liberation movement:
Despite all of the above, when a Viennese-born journalist named Theodor Herzl finally started the movement, Zionism, that would eventually achieve the great miracle of making the Jews the only indigenous people in recent memory to successfully reclaim their land, the enemies of the Jews were quick to condemn it as a colonialist enterprise.
This was back in the 19th century. Sadly, little has changed.
Today’s progressives don’t talk about Zionism’s deep historic roots or about the Zionist leaders’ insistence on paying a fair price for every inch of land purchased from Arab landlords, or their repeated efforts to make peace with their Arab neighbors and share the land.
In fact, when the United Nations voted in 1947 on a partition plan that would carve out one nation for Jews and one for Arabs, the Jews adopted it right away; the Arabs rejected it and waged war.
Similarly, Israel has approached its Arab neighbors with peace offerings over the years, only to be largely spurned.
•Israel is struggling with monomaniacal, homicidal Palestinian neighbors:
In 1964, an Egyptian swindler named Yasser Arafat started the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) with the express purpose of liberating what he argued was the Palestinian homeland from its Jewish occupiers.
This, mind you, was three years before Israel won the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after being attacked yet again by its Arab neighbors in 1967.
This simple math tells the whole story: The Palestinians never really wanted coexistence or peace; they just wanted all Israelis to be gone.
Despite that, Israel took a huge risk and made peace with Arafat’s PLO in 1993.
The old leopard, however, couldn’t turn his spots and remained committed to launching wave after wave of deadly terror attacks, even as he was allegedly negotiating peace.
His successor, Mahmoud Abbas, currently in year 18 of his four-year term, continues to champion his Palestinian Authority’s Pay for Slay program, rewarding any Palestinian who murders Israeli Jews with a handsome lifetime salary.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, things are even worse: After Israel freely withdrew from the Strip in 2005, the homicidal Islamist group Hamas took power and went on to devote all of its resources, including billions of dollars in international aid, not to hospitals, schools and other staples of civic society, but to digging terror tunnels into Israel, amassing weapons, and launching periodic and unprovoked attacks on citizens in southern Israel.
Despite all that, eight consecutive Israeli prime ministers have spent the last two decades making peaceful overtures to the Palestinians, again and again signing agreements, providing funds, and making goodwill gestures only to be met with uniform violence.
•Even when fighting in self-defense, Israel holds itself to higher moral standards:
On April 7 of this year, Palestinian terrorists shot an Israeli car, incapacitating it; they then calmly approached the vehicle and executed in cold blood the three defenseless women inside: Lucy Dee and her daughters Maia, 20, and Rina, 15.
Heinous attacks like these are tragically commonplace in Israel.
Yet while Israel continues to fight terrorism and defend its citizens, it also goes to extraordinary lengths to make sure no innocent Palestinians suffer needlessly.
After a Palestinian terrorist smashed the skull of a young Israeli, murdering him, the Israeli Army sought to demolish the terrorist’s home as a means of deterring such attacks. The terrorist’s family, however, appealed to Israel’s Supreme Court, arguing that the killer’s wife and children should not be punished for his deeds. The court accepted their appeal.
Similarly, the court routinely hears the appeals of Israelis and Palestinians alike whose property rights are challenged by decades of war and areas changing hands in its aftermath.
Even more radically, when responding to unprovoked attacks by Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces take the unparalleled measure of informing Palestinian civilians of upcoming operations against terrorist targets in order to give them adequate time to find safe shelter.
•Israel’s Arab citizens are moving on up:
Walk around the Quad and you might hear chants about Israel being an apartheid state. In reality, however, Israeli Arabs, who make up roughly 20% of the nation’s population, not only enjoy equal rights but are benefiting from more opportunities and growth than Arabs in any of Israel’s neighboring countries.
Syria remains plunged in a deadly civil war that has killed more than 306,000 civilians in a decade — more than 20 times the number of Israelis and Palestinians combined killed by the conflict since 1987.
Lebanon is governed by Iranian-backed, murderous mullahs.
Israel, meanwhile, continues to invest considerable resources in making sure its Arab minority thrives.
Since 2012, the Israeli Council for Higher Education invested roughly $300 million in a program to encourage Israeli Arabs to attend Israeli institutions of higher education, leading to a 60% spike in enrollment.
And the program’s impact was felt far beyond the ivory tower; walk into any Israeli hospital today and it’s very likely that the doctor or nurse treating you will be an Israeli Arab; 35% of the nation’s pharmacists, for example, are Israeli Arabs, and Arab citizens enjoy a growing representation in the media, arts and culture, civil service, business and every other corridor of life.
Add to that the fact that Israeli Arabs’ votes count just the same as those of their Jewish neighbors or the fact that Israeli Arabs have numerous political parties represented in the Israeli parliament, and you see why allegations of apartheid are laughable.
These facts and others like them may boggle the mind of any student held captive by so-called progressive professors talking about Israel.
But while we should continue to debate the many intricate points about the long and complicated Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we must never succumb to a simplistic and hateful narrative that accuses Israelis, and them alone among all the world’s nations, of ludicrous crimes.
Now that we’re out of school, Let’s take a moment to get something our woke institutions increasingly deny us: an education.
Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large of Tablet and co-host of its podcast, Unorthodox.
