Jews against Jewish survival

OPINION:

The ghoulish spectacle of the coffins of children being paraded through the streets of the Gaza Strip to the cheers of the mob shows the moral blindness of those who prattle about ethnic cleansing.

It makes the Feb. 13 full-page ad in The New York Times by 350 Jewish leftists so appalling.

The broadside denounced President Trump’s Gaza renewal plan as — you guessed it — “ethnic cleansing.” It was signed by luminaries such as actors Joaquin Phoenix and Debra Winger, playwright Tony Kushner and a number of rabbis from “The Church of What’s Happening Now.”

The signers also included director Jonathan Glazer. In accepting an Academy Award last year for his Holocaust film, “Zone of Interest,” Mr. Glazer compared Israel’s defensive war in Gaza to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre. In other words, killing 1,200 Jews and fighting back to keep more Jews from being killed are morally equivalent.

Though well-meaning, the president’s plan to get nearby Arab states to take the Palestinians is impractical. No one wants them, and with good reason.

Lebanon was a thriving multireligious state until the Palestinians arrived in the 1970s. Now it’s controlled by Hezbollah. Jordan had to defeat the Palestine Liberation Organization, which tried to oust King Hussein in the early 1970s.

The ad was headlined “Jewish People Say No to Ethnic Cleansing.” These guys are a riot. Whatever they want, they claim to be speaking for the Jewish people. If they did an anti-DOGE ad, it would read: “Jews Say No to Eliminating Waste, Fraud and Abuse in Government.”

Muslims practically invented ethnic cleansing.

When Muhammad conquered the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, Jewish and Christian tribes were massacred or converted by the sword. To this day, Jews are forbidden to live in Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

In the 1920s, the Arabs, who came to be called Palestinians, staged a series of pogroms to drive Jews from the Holy Land.

Haj Amin Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and original spokesman for Palestinian nationalism, spent World War II in Berlin helping Adolf Hitler carry out the Holocaust. The mufti even raised a legion of Muslims from the Balkans to fight alongside the Nazis. When Israel became independent in 1948, he declared a holy war.

During Israel’s war of independence, six Arab armies attacked with the goal of “driving the Jews into the sea.” During that period, 850,000 Jews were exiled from Arab lands where their ancestors had lived for millennia.

The oft-stated goal of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority is ethnic cleansing. There will be no place for Jews in their future Palestinian state — from the river to the sea.

As for Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war, fighting terrorists is dirty work and civilian casualties are unavoidable. However, the figures that come from the Hamas-controlled Gazan Health Ministry are greatly exaggerated.

The casualty ratio in modern warfare, civilian to military, is 9-to-1. In Gaza, it’s 1.7-to-1.

The Times ad was virtue signaling at its worst. The signers were telling their friends in the so-called creative community: We may be Jews, but we put the left’s utopian vision above Jewish survival.

They risk nothing. If Israel is wiped off the map, jihadis won’t invade their Beverly Hills estates. Their children won’t be slaughtered before their eyes. Members of their families won’t be taken hostage and held in horrific conditions.

The emaciated hostages who were released a week ago looked like survivors of the death camps. A woman who was freed earlier said female hostages were being raped “night and day.” Hamas uses the bodies of dead Jewish babies as bargaining chips. This is what Israel is fighting.

A 2024 Public Opinion Strategies poll refutes the ad’s claim to speak for the Jewish people. In the survey, 70% of American Jews said anti-Zionist movements are inherently antisemitic.

Jonathan Schulman, executive director of The Jewish Majority, explains: “For a long time, we have seen a well-organized and well-financed movement of individuals speaking up in the media about their anti-Zionism from their position as a Jew, and what we have found is that these positions are fringe and that they don’t represent a majority of American Jews.”

Hollywood Jews are willing to trade the lives and suffering of others to prove their compassion. They speak for no one but themselves.

In the words of the Amidah prayer, said three times a day in synagogue, “And for slanderers, let there be no hope.”

• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.