CMU Osher: Teaching hate unopposed

It has been almost 30 years since I immigrated in the US as a refugee from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is no more, but I am experiencing a déjà vu of my Soviet past. One of the standard responses of the Soviet authorities to any request of the citizens, including that for allowing emigration, was that it was "inadvisable." That meant simply "no" in the Soviet bureaucratese—with no further discussion possible. Attempts to appeal were hopeless. It was particularly so when the decisions had anything to do with Israel or Jews. A standard way to prevent a Jew from enrollment in a college, in order to maintain its Jewish quota, was to grade poorly the composition entry exam, with the comment that the topic was not sufficiently explicated. One could not appeal such a decision—there was no way to prove the opposite. You can imagine my feelings when I received, after my repeated inquiries and long wait, the same kind of response from the leadership of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

To wit, that response was about the non-renewal of the 5-lecture volunteer course that Stuart Pavilack, the executive director of the Zionist Organization of America-Pittsburgh, and I had presented, entitled "Israel's War and Peace: Past, Present, Future." As we described it in the Osher catalog, the objective was to discuss the causes and consequences of hostilities that have accompanied Israel’s existence. Opposing hateful ideology is always important, especially these days, when threats to the Jewish state and individual Jews are at a peak not seen since before WW2. I stated this goal in the interview about the course  for the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle (1/4/2019, p. 2). Osher Institutes offer their fee-paying members, largely retirees (aged reportedly over 70 on average in Osher at CMU), numerous courses (140 at CMU) given pro bono "by members, volunteers, faculty from CMU and other regional colleges and universities, and representatives from community organizations, all eager to share their expertise and engage in dialogue with their peers."

Plenty of the course material had been collected, and I had presented parts of it in Men’s Club of the Tree of Life congregation in years past (by invitation—I was not a member). Nevertheless, it took quite a long time to write it up and create slides for 7.5 hours of talking, updating them until the last moment. The talks were interspersed with lively discussions, largely initiated by the listeners with a certain, let’s call it “anti-Zionist,” ideological bent. That bent was also obvious in the negative opinions about the course.

It is those opinions, from a small minority among the listeners, that were used as the purported reason to dismiss the course from the curriculum. All the detailed arguments in my attempts of email communication with the chair of the curriculum committee and the president of the Osher board have been quite rudely dismissed as well, without as much as a word about their substance, and eventually left with no reply. While stating that the decision to not renew the course was based on attendees’ evaluations, no criteria have been given in response to my requests. Any possibility of appeal has been denied in the manner one does not expect from an academic institution, albeit neither the curriculum committee chair nor the Osher board president is an academic.

Meanwhile, I was not surprised to find in the Summer 2019 CMU Osher curriculum a rerun of another course, by one Tina Whitehead. Its description states that it is presented "from the perspective of the Palestinian people." That could suffice to characterize the course’s content: according to the latest poll, that perspective is 93% antisemitic. I do know, however, that hers is also the perspective of the organization she represents, Sabeel. That is a “liberation theology” group, with the center in Jerusalem. It is antisemitic as well, under the currently common guise of being peacefully anti-Israel/anti-Zionist. A telling quote, from an Easter message of Sabeel's founder and leader, Rev. Ateek:

Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him. It only takes people of insight to see the hundreds of thousands of crosses throughout the land, Palestinian men, women, and children being crucified. Palestine has become one huge Golgotha. The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily.

This is a resurrection indeed—of the familiar image of the satanic deicidal Jew now murdering children, the foundation of Jewish persecution now cloaked in plausible deniability: well, it’s about Israel not Jews. Ateek’s book, “A Palestinian Theology of Liberation: The Bible, Justice, and the Palestine,” contains traditional antisemitic calumnies, such as Jews’ not considering non-Jews human. In his view, “the creation of the state of Israel has been a settler colonial enterprise by Zionism that sought to dispossess the Palestinians—Muslims and Christians—of their land and replace them with Jews.” The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh cut its partnering with Pittsburgh Theological Seminary after the seminary hosted Ateek.

Sabeel sees Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, which was renamed "Palestine" to erase its Jewish connection and meaning, as evil and affront to Christian theology. Sabeel’s goal is for the millions of descendants of the Arabs who fled from Israel in 1948-9, as well the Arab population of the territories that were illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt until the Six-Day War, to flood Israel and eradicate it as the Jewish state. It does not matter to Sabeel, a Christian group, that Israel is the only Middle East country where Christians flourish instead of disappearing. While paying obligatory lip service to non-violence, Sabeel's doublethink website quotes the call for violence by a terrorist poet and threatens violence to the "Israeli people" (obviously, Jews, although 20% of Israelis are Arab) who dare visit Jerusalem. Demanding self-determination for Arabs, who have been self-determined in 21 states, all intolerant Muslim monarchies and dictatorships, it denies the right to self-determination for the Jewish people in a single democratic state with equal rights for all.

Sabeel approves Hamas terror as “the message of the rockets [that] addresses the core issues and the root causes of the problem.” Indeed it does, as those issues and causes are one: implacable Jew-hate. Unsurprisingly, Sabeel calls for support for an American antisemite, a Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar, as it did for the communist antisemite Angela Davis and the academic antisemite Marc Lamont Hill. It also supports the "Great March of Return," Hamas’s ploy to use human shields to penetrate from Gaza into Israel and proceed with mass murder of Israelis in their homes.

The course we presented was the only one in CMU Osher's annual curriculum that, based on the rich factual material, could counter the antisemitic/anti-Israel propaganda by the Sabeel emissary and inform the audience of the complex history, current status, and potential outcomes in one of the most important points of contention in the world. The brief "explanation" of its cancellation, from the curriculum committee chair Circe Curley, contained falsehoods, such as that my "extensive discussion of anti-Semitism in one of [my] classes differed from the original course outline and the published course description." It certainly did not. Moreover, the very idea that a discussion of antisemitism in a course about Israel could be somehow outside of its scope is preposterous and illustrates the mindset of the committee. Most importantly, the committee ignored the clear ideological bias of the negative evaluation statements, despite my repeated pointing that out and the committee chair’s recognition that they "normally do not experience that [negativism] in course evaluations."

Given CMU Osher’s continued support for anti-Israel antisemitic lecturing, the cancellation of my course—after its first presentation and based on no objective or, indeed, known criteria—should have been expected. It also cannot be viewed as other than support for the views that historically have led to pogroms and terror around the world. It is those views, propagated by the likes of Sabeel ideologues, that have led to the resurgence of lethal antisemitism lately. In effect, CMU Osher has become an antisemitic propaganda platform, a tool of hate.

In this light, it is hardly a mere coincidence that the CMU Osher board president, James Reitz, is an active member of the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, which is partnered with Sabeel and supports the antisemitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The ideological predecessors of Sabeel, including the Soviet KGB that contributed so much to "the perspective of the Palestinian people," would be happy to know that their views are now mainstreamed unopposed from American university podiums.

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The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle's take on the story is published at  https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/cmu-osher-course-on-israel-canceled-palestinian-perspective-course-renewed/ (in the print edition: May 17, 2019, vol. 62, No. 20, p. 4 )

Political trompe-l'oeil

The paintings creating illusion of 3D reality on a 2D surface are fascinating. While looking online for ways to fix our living-room fireplace whose beautiful century-old face bricks had been mercilessly painted over by previous owners, I found suggestions to paint a trompe-l'oeil fireplace if a room was lacking a real one. This could be a solution particularly in an apartment, where a real fireplace is unfeasible or unusable. This also reminded me of the Pinocchio fairy-tale, where the painted boiling pot was so realistic that the hungry wooden boy's nose grew two inches longer out of frustration that he could not take the lid off.

In the Soviet version of Pinocchio, The Little Golden Key, whereby the story was transformed into a class struggle of oppressed and exploited puppets against their evil owner, behind the trompe-l'oeil painting there is a door that is opened by a golden key, and behind that door there is a wonderful puppet theater, miniature and mechanical, but as realistic as life. There is nothing at all, let alone reality, behind Obama's politics. 

Or behind himself, to start with. I am not even talking about his nonexistent credentials for being the choice to lead the most powerful and wealthy nation on earth. I am talking about his gaining and losing dimensions at will, as a painter can do to depictions of reality. The millionaire Obama, born from a native well-off Kenyan by a white mother and raised by a well-off Indonesian step-father and white grandparents under affirmative action and no influence of racism, is a trompe-l'oeil of poor black Americans who descended from slaves and only in the 1960's gained civil rights. In contrast, his millions of dollars, made with no responsibility for any business, disappear from the mental view of the masses. Of course, Romney's millions, to which he contributed his talents and efforts as a businessman, are an unforgivable vice. 

Romney's religion was the atheist progressives' favorite topic during elections: he was a "Bishop", possessed "magic pants", was a hereditary polygamist, and, in the most uncool fashion, used no intoxicants. It did not matter that Obama belonged to a fascist church, and had Farrakhan's friend and America-hater as his spiritual advisor, his daughters' godfather, as dear to him as his own grandmother. Because the Christianity of Mormonism is suspect in the religious Republican base, Obama's kind of Christianity could not be raised as an issue in the Romney campaign. Being the first president who had admitted to drug abuse to the point of being a junkie deducted no points either from Obama in the evolving surreality of America. 

The magic of illusion does not stop at home. Here is a recent example of how Obama and Arab fascists mutually benefit from each other, painting the trompe-l'oeil of peace-making. Muslim Brotherhood, by its Hamas arm, conducts terror war against Israel.  After years of bombardment by thousands of rockets causing mass posttraumatic stress disorder in children and adults, let alone fatalities, Israel finally intends to put a stop on this. A ground invasion and decisive elimination of the terror cadre and infrastructure - much more feasible than it was in the abortive 2006 Lebanon war - could solve the problem for a long time. To be sure, the calm would not last forever, considering that Islam doctrinally hates the Jews, the Land of Israel for the Muslims is Islamic waqf that can never be relinquished, and every true Muslim is duty bound to wage jihad against Israel as the Jew and an aggressor on the Muslim land. The removal of the terror organization would give Israel a respite and a chance to resume a semblance of normal life. Obama knows that but is not interested in the welfare of Israelis (and, for that matter, Gazans). He will paint himself a peacemaker by using what he knows will work with Egypt - a threat of withholding the $2 bln help to the fascist regime. Responding positively to that threat is a multiple win for Morsi: the money, the recognition by the US as a legitimate government, no loss of face because the result is presented as victory (everything short of radical defeat is a victory for terrorist Muslims), the showing-off of the ability to control the situation and manipulate the terror force. 

After I wrote this, Morsi showed the world another "win" of his: immediately after "arranging" the cease-fire between Hamas and Israel at the behest of Obama, he issued a set of decrees conferring dictatorial powers on him - the price of Obama's "peace". It is a win-win for Obama as well: he will dispense the tax-payers money to make a false vision of supporting Israel, but will not allow the weapons to be used for Israel's defense even though the case for that is clear; it will be the Jews' fault that the US has to spend more  money, which will feed into his antisemitic agenda; he will (already has) co-opt the Republican threat of depriving Egypt of the money while losing no political standing by that.  Although the rocket rain on Israel has stopped, the only loser in this game is Israel: it is a matter of time that the terror starts again, as it is Hamas's main goal, identical to its means. The intensity of the Hamas rocket bombardment of Israel justified invading Gaza with the potential of Hamas's liquidation or at least substantial damage. Now, if, or rather when, the bombardment restarts, there will be no such justification. Israel's threats are now empty: no benefit except from the temporary cessation of rockets is apparent - whatever empty promises they got from Hillary. No point in mentioning any Hamas's promises.

More peacemaker illusion by our Commander-in-Cheat: Obama's informing the Taliban enemy of the departure schedule renders unnecessary the losses the enemy would suffer through the continuous fighting. The low intensity of the war also protects Obama from the responsibility for active military actions - those could be dropped in full onto the successor. Alternatively, the enemy takeover that will render all US sacrifices senseless is postponed and would also be somebody else's, not Obama's, fault. 

The Benghazi story started as a very convincing trompe-l'oeil of the administration's victory over terrorism: it was all spontaneous and vaguely righteous if wrong reaction to a bad YouTube video blaspheming Islam that Obama had sworn to protect as one of his duties as a US President. Albeit slightly shaken, the illusion still works, because the discussion now is whether that was an intentional illusion or just some miscommunication between the diplomacy and the intelligence - not about the fact that Muslim terrorists successfully attacked a sovereign American territory and killed Americans - again - and again on 9/11.

There is no depth behind the painting drawn by Obama's junta to entice its willing followers - just the tireless populist slogans, largely translating into coveting neighbor's wealth, now that religion is a sign of backwardness just like it was in the leader of all progressive forces in the world, the Soviet Union. There is no reality behind the pitifully petty arguments the progressive intelligentsia puppets repeat after their political puppeteers, using at will the agitprop tools of Bolshevism. 

"Progressive" as a term originates from among those tools, the Soviet propaganda machinery, designating fellow travelers and - the same thing - enemies of capitalism, colonialism and Zionism (e.g., "всё прогрессивное человечество", "all progressive humanity"). In other words, allies of communism who have just not had a chance to enjoy political victory. Progressivism, like any totalitarian ideology, does not tolerate alternatives. It is thus eliminationist. The opponent is not to argue with, but to annihilate. The thought apparatus for such annihilation is there, and only a slight historical turn is needed - to incite and justify pogroms and "defend" order by abolishing the hard-gained American freedoms (does the arrest of the anti-Muhammad "movie"-maker tell you anything about the 1st Amendment?). By the time that happens, the masses will be only grateful for that to the dear fuhrer, scared by another "spontaneous" riot to death. This will finally puncture the canvas of the illusionist painting. No golden key will be needed to open the abyss hidden behind it. A bad dream? So thought the incredulous Russian intelligentsia in 1917 and later, relieved of its possessions for the sake of "fair share", of its freedoms for the sake of the triumph of communism, and of its freedom and lives for the sake of state security and order.

Champion of displacement

Nobody is going to be surprised that today’s article in The New York Times, “A Champion for the Displaced in Israel”, is not about hundreds of thousands of Jews who were “displaced” (expelled and murdered) by Arab pogrom mobs throughout the Middle East, ethnically cleansing it of the ancient population that preceded Arab invaders by many centuries. These Jews and their descendants constitute half of the Israeli Jewish population, and have never been compensated for their losses. No, in the inverted world of the Times, the “displaced” in Israel are Arabs, the descendants of those invaders. It is unclear what exactly makes them to qualify for that status: the only people mentioned there who are displaced and whose homes are demolished are the Jews, Israelis, the Natives of the Land of Israel, who are given the preposterous misnomer of “settlers”. And the “champion” of those Arabs, whose only geopolitical dream is to displace the Jews from any piece of land, is a Jewish lawyer, Michael Sfard.

Usually, when a person raised in the Jewish culture (or a culture based on the Jewish values) takes an enemy’s side, it requires inversion of values and shedding of morality. When a lawyer in a democracy defends a murderer, he does not need to be on the murderer’s side to perform his duties. The murderer represents only himself even if he is a gang member. It is different when a lawyer takes upon himself the defense of a group against another group and does that consistently, especially when the group – in its overwhelming majority – is an enemy of the group to which the lawyer himself belongs. And not just any enemy. With some enemies, compromise can be and has been reached, but the Palestinian Arabs have given no sign of that possibility. They are self-proclaimed enemies of Israel. Their goal, at best, is Israel’s eradication, and at worst, the world-wide genocide of the Jews. It is symbolic that the name for the country they want to replace Israel is “Palestine”, the very same name that was invented by Hadrian the Roman emperor to eradicate the notion of Judea and the Jews from the same land. His wish has in part been fulfilled already, as the historic name of Judea has been virtually replaced by the nonsensical “West Bank”, an invention of Jordan that illegally occupied the land until 1967. Whereas the occupation ended, and the Jordanian annexation of the land had never been recognized by the world (with the notable exceptions of the UK and Pakistan), the name has stuck to the degree that somebody’s use of the original and true names, Judea and Samaria, is now viewed as a tell-tale sign of “right-wing” extremism. According to the article, those are just the “Biblical names” – and who cares about the Bible in our enlightened times. Obviously, since “right” is associated with fascism, it is easy to make the next step and accuse the Jews of nazism, a calumny that is so popular nowadays among antisemites in general and in the Muslim world in particular.

Sfard pathetically juxtaposes himself with the Soviet dissidents, expressing his satisfaction that he does his subversive work unmolested in a democracy. Soviet dissidents, which now have to defend the right of the Jews to live on the Land of Israel against him, have risked their lives for the Jews to be able to live in Eretz Israel, while he abuses Israel's legal system to ethnically cleanse it of the Jews. He is not "an enemy of the right" – he is an enemy of those who stand for what is right. He is the enemy's collaborationist. Along with other deluded or immoral people whom he defends, like the draft dodgers in Israel, he is adored by the likes of the NY Times and BBC, well known for their anti-Israel bias, and despised by the Israelis. Don’t expect this “defender of human rights” to defend the rights of the “settlers” – in his book, they are not listed as humans. Morally displaced, he is indeed a champion – of the displacement of Jews. No wonder that he has Gandhi's portrait on the wall - the "likeness" of a man who advised the Jews to comply with Hitler's plans.

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April 2013. - A follow-up to this entry, in response to Sfard's talk at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, is at "Antisemitism By Other Means: Lecturing Against The Jewish State", and, a shorter version, in The Jewish Chronicle, "Michael Sfard: 'I Don't Care About History'".

What's in a name?

A lot. For instance, when the situation in the Middle East is discussed, it would help to use unbiased terminology. Whereas the “international community”, largely biased against Israel, may have accepted the absurd name, the “West Bank”, that was given by Jordan to the territory it illegally seized in the 1948-49 war, this should not be perpetuated if the discourse is based on intellectual honesty. The latter pertains also to the term “settlements”, which are Jewish villages and towns that differ from the Arab ones in the same area only by their civilization. Calling these towns and villages “settlements” biases the public perception by connoting their temporary character, ultimately targeting them for removal, as that has indeed happened in Sinai and Gush Katif. Needless to say, that was undisguised ethnic cleansing. The "international community" would not fail to classify it as such for anybody else, but not the Jews. But of course, when the Jews themselves invented a euphemism just for that occasion, "disengagement". Euphemisms are helpful to the "international community" when it deals with the Jews. When the Jews were shipped from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka, the Germans called it "relocation".

Accepting the name “West Bank” for Judea and Samaria is no different from accepting “al Quds” as the name for Jerusalem. Compliance with the non-Jewish naming conventions is already expressed in the names’ changes from Yehudah/Shomron and Yerushalayim. This could well suffice. It is the Arabs who are settlers in the Land of Israel, not the Jews who are the natives of that land. Imagine what would happen if the mandate given by the League of Nations to the UK, which allowed it to create Trans-Jordan from 80% of the territory instead of the promised Jewish national home, were called not Palestine but by its historic names - Judea, Samaria, etc. - what would the "Palestinians" be called now? "Judeans" - or perhaps simply "Jews"? Our language forms our thinking and ultimately actions. Let's get it straight.

Occupiers and natives

I'll start, indeed, with duplicating one of the items located on my Israel on My Mind website. Not for better, but for worse, nothing that made me to write it has changed.

July 19, 2003. - I was invited to celebrate Independence Day by a nice American couple. Almost everybody there, with a rare Canadian exception, was a US-born American citizen. I would like to emphasize this ''US-born,'' the point close to the root of the problems discussed here.

As usual where a group of Jews is gathered, the conversation turned to Israel. I had known that the hosts were far to the left from me. For this reason, and because of the traditional voting pattern, I expected everybody to be a Democrat (which I, increasingly reluctantly, was myself). Unexpected, however, were the opinions regarding Middle East conflicts. First, even though support for the Iraq war, according to the polls, is the same among Jews as in the rest of the population, in this highly educated group it was scarce. More dramatic, it was even scarcer for Israel. There was little time left to find out why exactly, but two main points were clear: Israel was considered a cruel occupying power, and Arabs were unreservedly viewed as the suffering party.

I do not need to go into the much discussed issue of why Israel's rule in the disputed territories of Judea, Samaria and Gaza is not occupation - an interested reader is referred to the in-depth and definitive treatment of this issue by Eugene Rostow (former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, 1966-1969, and one of the drafters of UNSC Resolution 242) and Dore Gold. Jews have full legal right to live anywhere in these territories - the same as the right to live in Tel Aviv or Haifa. Clearly, however, the pro-Arab propaganda, operating with lies and distortions, has suppressed the influence of any objective information. Indeed, the human mind is selective in its information processing. It assimilates better what goes along with a pre-existing perspective (which, if not based on objective knowledge, is called prejudice), and, within the time limits afforded, can absorb only a limited amount. This is why the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, can comfortably lie about "500 victims" of the Israeli operation in Jenin, perfectly knowing that this lie will be disproved. He does not care about his credibility - he knows he has none. What matters to him as an experienced disciple of Goebbels is that this abhorrent misinformation is thunderously amplified by the media and fills the limited information space, feeding on old prejudices and supplanting truth, just as poisonous carbon monoxide supplants oxygen in the blood. This means that even if an equal amount of truth were to follow, it would be inadequate to set the record straight.

Any truth, however, is hardly forthcoming from major media sources, whose reporting standards have been hopelessly compromised by outright fraud compounded by anti-Israel bias. Nobody is surprised any longer that The New York Times published that photograph of a bloodied Jewish youth, Tuvia Grossman, protected from the Arab mob by a vicious-looking Israeli policeman – with the title “An Israeli policeman and a Palestinian on the Temple Mount” - and this is on the clearly seen background of a gas station (see Mr. Grossman's own account of that lynch attempt). BBC’s reporting in Israel has deserved its comparison with another notorious media source, Nazi “Der Stuermer,” which incited Germans to genocide.

The gross distortion of truth about Israel is promoted by a distinct group of intellectuals, whose left, right, Muslim, socialist and other platforms converge on one point – their Jew-hatred. The difference from the Nazi situation is two-fold. First, as observed in a comment attributed to Martin Luther King, “the times have made it unpopular, in the West, to proclaim openly a hatred of the Jews.” Second, the left were themselves persecuted by Hitler, so that they had little chance to join him in his genocidal effort. The same is true about Jew-haters among the Jews themselves, whose participation in Nazi crimes was limited to the few collaborationists who served in Judenrats (ghetto councils) and ghetto police. The times of war usually polarize people’s positions, and gradations in politically charged opinions become less likely. Nowadays, in what we – erroneously - perceive as peace, the Jewish opponents of Israel vary in shades from disliking the thought that they may be identified with whatever antisemitic/anti-Israel stereotypes and prejudice the Gentile population may entertain (which in Steven Rose's case extends to disliking the source of his misfortune of being born Jewish – his parents) to acting as a supporter of the mass murderers of Jews. These supporters, the contemporary candidates for the ghetto police and Auschwitz kapo jobs, include, but are not limited to, Stanley Cohen, the narcissistic Hamas attorney paid from the money this terrorist group gets from Saudis and Iran for murdering Jewish babies, and the Jewish members of the International Solidarity Movement who "recognize the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle".

Regardless of psychological and historical roots of anti-Israelism, the result is the same – the unshakable belief that Israel is illegitimate and occupies the land whose natives – Arabs – have been treated as (or more) unjustly as were American Indians. The peculiar interweaving of these roots has resulted in the cancellation of a simple truth that the natives in the Land of Israel are Jews. Arabs are invaders or, at best, settlers, just as, before them, were Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans and whoever else tortured the Holy Land. The only difference from other invaders is that Arabs have never even ruled over “Palestine,” except when 80% of it was cut off by the British in 1921 and handed over to their puppet Abdullah bin Husayn for his service as his fiefdom. It is ironic that the emirate, and later kingdom, where Jews have been prohibited by law from settling, was given a Jewish name – the name of the Jordan river.

The Jewish presence in the whole of the Land of Israel has never been interrupted, despite all efforts of invaders. But even in places where it was, as it happened in Hevron (Hebron) after Arab pogroms instigated by the Nazi mufti Amin al-Husseini, this does not make invaders natives - just as nobody would think of white New Yorkers as Native Americans, even though the tribes who used to live on Manhattan may not even exist anymore. Being US-born, even in several generations, does not make you a native of the land. The difference in the perception of “nativeness” is all the more striking considering that Indians left no cities on Manhattan, whereas the “Palestinian” city of Hevron, under this very name, was the first capital of Israel under King David, when nobody had even heard of Arabs. The tombs of the Jewish patriarchs are there, in the place bought by Abraham. That Jews could come and worship there again only after the Six Day War, after 700 years of prohibition under Muslim “tolerant” rule, had not made the cave of Machpelah Arab. It is the Jewish names under which this land is known to all humanity, despite all efforts to rename Hevron into al-Khalil, Jerusalem into Aelia Capitolina (Romans) or al-Quds (Arabs), and the whole land into Syria Palaestina (Romans), Palestine (British), or Filastiniya (Arabs). No Orwellian effort to rewrite history can change the fact that Yerushalayim (Jerusalem) has been the capital of the Jewish - and no other - State since King David. Hevron is located in Judean Hills, Judea, the land of Jews.


PS. Little that I knew then, in 2003, that in 2010 an American administration would be first to introduce the Arabic replacement name into the official lingo.

Watch, and think about who those students “from Palestine” were, in the ‘70s in Egypt, who taught him “to live in peace and security” and “to practice our faith freely” (unless, of course, he is a Muslim, and "our faith" is Islam). You probably know that the Saudi duties as “custodians of the two holy mosques” include not allowing any non-Muslim to the land of the two "holy mosques", let alone building anything Jewish or Christian in the whole of Saudi Arabia.

If you ever travel to "Palestine", perhaps you’ll visit "Al Quds". I am not sure who will be its custodians, if this administration of Saudi supplicants succeeds in its hard work of creating the new pale of settlement for Jews, this time in the Land of Israel itself.