It’s Time for American Jewry to Drop the Banner of Palestinian Statehood

Since the Oslo Accords, left-wing and mainstream American Jewish organizations, even those that are undeniably pro-Israel, have endorsed or supported the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Justin Hayet argues that these groups should cease making this cause their own:

A recent Jerusalem Post report indicated that Israel and the UAE are leading international efforts to dismantle the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the . . aid organization that promotes unparalleled corruption, funnels money to terrorists, and perpetuates the myth of the Palestinian refugee problem across multiple generations—a “right of return” apparently only granted to Palestinian refugees and no other refugees in modern history.

This is critical: a leading Arab nation, in fact a powerhouse in the Arab League (as well as a surrogate for Saudi Arabia), the UAE sees no value in UNRWA—and in fact alleges that the agency undermines prospects for peace. This move is unprecedented; the UAE is no longer allowing the Palestinian leadership to hold the region hostage.

Why must American Jews cling to a cause that acts against the interest of the Jewish state and its Arab neighbors? Do we want to live in a world where the Israeli government is more closely aligned with the Sunni Arab states than with the United States and its Jewish powerhouse of a Diaspora?

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Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Abraham Accords, American Jewry, Palestinian statehood

What Israel Can Learn from Its Declaration of Independence

March 22 2023

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.

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Read more at RealClear Politics

More about: Israel's Basic Law, Israeli Declaration of Independence, Israeli politics