The Trump State Department recently
held a virtual conference to combat anti-Semitism, but seemingly
ignored the threat to American Jews posed by white supremacists,
neo-Nazis and others, while concentrating their criticisms on the
advocates for human rights in Palestine, which is under the total
control of Israel and its apartheid laws and regulations.
Palestinians
have only those privileges that Israel allows them and those
privileges are few. The citizens of the Gaza Strip have, for
generations, lived as refugees in the places they are allowed to live
in the West Bank, piled into a small area. But the U.S. special envoy
whose charge it is to fight anti-Semitism globally has singled out
those who advocate for Palestinian rights as the principle offenders,
according to observers, including Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).
Said
Rabbi Alissa Wise, deputy director of JVP, on Oct 23, “Yesterday
I saw the news that Elan Carr, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and
combat anti-Semitism, was pressuring the State Department to slander
trusted human rights organizations like Oxfam, Human Rights Watch,
and Amnesty International as anti-Semitic because of their work for
Palestinian rights. Make no mistake: this maneuver has nothing to do
with Jewish safety. It’s straight out of Trump’s
playbook; Carr is attempting to wield accusations of anti-Semitism as
a weapon to undermine Palestinian activism for the administration’s
political gain.”
Deutsche
Welle (DW), Germany’s international broadcaster, noted last
summer that anti-Semitism in the U.S. hit a four-decade high,
according to the Anti-Defamation League, which reported that 2019 was
the worst year for anti-Semitic attacks since the ADL began keeping
records. “This included a massive uptick in violent assaults.”
DW went on to report: “The ADL’s annual audit published
last summer found that more than 2,000 acts of assault, vandalism,
and harassment had occurred, the most since the group started keeping
track in 1979. ‘The record number of incidents came as the
Jewish community grappled with vicious and lethal anti-Semitic
attacks against communities in Poway, Jersey City and Monsey, and a
spree of violent assaults in Brooklyn,’ the ADL noted in its
report.”
There
have been, as of last summer, 96 victims of violent assaults,
including five fatalities, across the U.S., 25 of which were targeted
in Brooklyn alone. The area is home to many Hasidic and
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. The total of anti-Semitic
incidents in the U.S. was 2,107, according to the ADL, a startling
increase in all states, except Hawaii and Alaska.
Yet,
according to Rabbi Wise, special envoy Carr was pressuring the State
Department “to slander trusted human rights organizations like
Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International as anti-Semitic
because of their work for Palestinian rights. Make no mistake: this
maneuver has nothing to do with Jewish safety. It’s straight
out of (President) Trump’s playbook; Carr is attempting to
wield accusations of anti-Semitism as a weapon to undermine
Palestinian activism for the administration’s political gain.”
The
Trump Administration hardly recognizes the existence of Palestinians
in their own country, but puts its seal of approval on anything
Israel does, including virtually total suppression of the rights of a
people removed from their homes and villages after World War II and
kept in refugee status, many within a few miles of their former
homes, villages, and farms. Gaza, with its approximately two million
inhabitants, is described by many outside observers as the biggest
open-air prison on earth.
Gaza
is the most densely populated place on earth and its people have
little control over their lives. Israel controls what and who can
enter and leave the strip every day and, after the “war”
that was perpetrated on Gaza, the people there were left with very
little in the way of public services, including hospitals, medical
clinics, water treatment plants, sewage treatment plants, electricity
generating plants, schools and higher education.
Human
Rights Watch (HRW) has documented violations of human rights in
Palestine over the past several years, since the war on Gaza in 2008,
in which there was a lop-sided assault of one of the world’s
most powerful militaries on what was akin to an all-out attack on a
prison. HRW did acknowledge that there were some attacks by Gazans on
Israel via rockets and other low-level methods such as incendiary
kites and Molotov cocktails. But HRW declared that Israel’s
treatment of Palestinians needed to be investigated by the
International Criminal Court, which the U.S. will not allow.
These
are some of the issues of human rights and crimes against humanity
that groups like JVP are trying to stop, all the while stating that
it is working toward peace for all sides. The powerful political
parties that are in control of the U.S. are not much concerned about
Palestinians and their plight. For his part, Trump has rewarded
Israel, whatever it does, by moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem,
claiming that it is the capital of Israel, disregarding that it is
also the purported capital of a Palestinian state, as well. He and
his Republican Party have declared that the Golan Heights and much of
the West Bank are Israel’s, upending decades-long agreements
and treaties that such lands cannot be acquired as the result of war.
JVP
and others are peacefully trying to right the wrongs against
Palestinians at every level, with the stated goals of bringing peace
to all in the violently troubled region. Advocates for Palestinian
human rights are not the ones threatening American Jews and
perpetrating violence against American Jews. Rather, it is the
violent white supremacists, “militias,” neo-Nazis, and
others who are perpetrating the violence, but they are given a free
pass by the president, who has yet to condemn a single act of
violence against an entire people trapped in Gaza and most of the
West Bank. For Trump, they simply don’t exist.
Therefore,
he can encourage his anti-Semitism envoy to go after peaceful
advocates of Palestinian rights and supporters of the movement to
Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) Israel until that nation takes
positive action to relieve the suffering of an entire people. Make no
mistake about it; Israel is the only one that can make the
determination to do that. It has complete control and uses its
economic and military might to enforce its every edict, law, and
regulation to ensure that the Palestinians are kept inside the narrow
and deadly confines of their Bantustans.
U.S.
elected officials at every level, since they support Israel’s
every action against Palestinians, need to address what their country
has created in the Middle East. The U.S. has supported Israel with
money, diplomacy and, if need be, its military might, so without a
full-scale effort to free Palestinians, those in control of the U.S.
make a mockery of their country as a land of freedom, liberty,
equality, opportunity, and democracy.
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