Blame ‘the Big Lie’: Without truth, Mideast peace is not possible

This past summer was not a good one for the Jewish people or the Jewish State.

Operation Protective Edge reportedly embarrassed too many Jews in this country, none of whom should have been embarrassed. It also put Israel in a bad light, with accusations of war crimes, immorality, a genocidal agenda - accusations heard day after day over the airwaves, or read in newspapers, none of which bore relationship to the truth.

Protective Edge was not an "operation" as much as it was a full-scale war, fought against an intractable enemy with a very real genocidal agenda.

Make no mistake - Hamas wants all Jews dead, not just Israeli Jews. It says as much, without any sense of shame. It is part of Hamas' charter. According to that charter, Muslims are obligated - obligated - to "fight Jews and kill them." There is nothing ambiguous about that.

According to the Hamas charter, we Jews are a "warmongering" people who have been plotting for centuries to take over the world. For proof, the charter says, just read "the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

The so-called "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" is an infamous, flat-out fraud. It is not even original. It is less a forgery, and more of a gross example of plagiarism. It first appeared in France in the late 19th century, and apparently was written by someone who worked for the Russian secret police. It was a rewrite of a pamphlet written 30 years earlier that named France's emperor at the time, Napoleon III, as the one planning to take over the world. The emperor was deleted, the Jews were inserted, and a fraud was consummated.

Proven fraud though it is, the "Protocols" is at the heart of why it is almost impossible for Israel and the Palestinians to trust each other enough to make peace.

The real obstacle to peace is the Big Lie. Say something often enough, report something often enough, and it will be believed, no matter how untrue. Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler's minister of propaganda, the master of the big lie, taught us that.

Perhaps the biggest lie in the Arab-Israel dispute is that Jews and Arabs have hated each other, and have been fighting each other, for thousands of years. This is Big Lie No. 1.

Genesis 21 is often cited as the origin of that eternal enmity.

Nothing in Genesis 21 suggests any such thing. All we see there is Sarah urging her husband to send away Ishmael and his birth mother, Hagar. We do not really know why she wanted him to do so; Ishmael, after all, was legally her son; Hagar was only the surrogate who gave birth to him. We only know what Sarah herself told Abraham - she did not want Ishmael to share in Abraham's estate; "the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac," Genesis 21:10 has her saying.

Maybe, just maybe, Sarah and Hagar did not trust Abraham, as Rabbi David J. Zucker proposed some years ago in an article in Judaism: A Journal of Jewish Life and Thought.

Maybe, just maybe, they were worried Abraham might harm both Ishmael and Isaac.

After all, just a few years earlier, when he was 99 years old, Abraham took a knife and circumcised himself, then he circumcised Ishmael, and then he circumcised the hundreds of other males in his household. Abraham said God told him to do it, and we accept that He did, but they had no way of knowing whether this was true.

Maybe Sarah and Hagar feared something even more terrible might happen to Isaac, and so they conspired to set up a second home to which Sarah and Isaac could flee just in case. As it is, after the Binding of Isaac, we next see Sarah living apart from Abraham; she in Hebron, he in Beersheva.

Such a scenario is not beyond belief. In the very next chapter, Genesis 22, Abraham actually puts Isaac on a pile of wooden branches, and takes a knife to his throat.

After that incident, we never see father and son together. In fact, when we next encounter Isaac, he is living in a place called Beer L'chai Roi, a place Hagar herself named years earlier, and probably where she went after leaving Abraham's camp. It is possible, then, that Isaac was living with Hagar and Ishmael, or very near to them.

When Abraham is buried, Isaac and Ishmael are pictured standing side by side. Says the Torah: "And Isaac and Ishmael, his sons, buried him in the Cave of Machpelah....And Isaac settled in Beer L'chai Roi." Even for a time after Abraham died, Isaac, it seems, avoided anything that was his father's.

When Isaac marries, he brings his wife into his mother's tent in Hebron, not his father's tent in Beersheva.

Isaac appears to have gone to live with his brother and his stepmother. Yet the Torah sees nothing to remark on that, or in showing the two brothers standing side by side at Abraham's funeral. Neither of these speaks to hatred between the two.

And we can add this, from Genesis 28: "And when Esau realized [the] Canaanite women [he married] displeased his father Isaac, Esau went to Ishmael, and took as [another] wife Machalat, the daughter of Ishmael, the son of Abraham."

When Esau realizes his father is upset because his favorite son married Canaanite women, he goes and marries one of Ishmael's daughters. How would that make Isaac feel any better if he and Ishmael were mortal enemies? This also does not suggest hatred between the two. It suggests just the opposite.

When the Muslims conquered Babylonia in the mid 7th century, the leader of the Jewish community was known as the exilarch, and he was treated by the Muslim caliph as a king. According to Benjamin of Tudela, who witnessed it, when the exilarch visited the caliph every Thursday, the caliph sat the exilarch next to him on a second throne. The caliph also ordered everyone - Muslim, Jew, Christian, or whatever - to stand whenever the exilarch was present, and to salute him. Those who failed to do so faced 100 lashes of the whip. On those Thursday visits, as the exilarch made his way through the streets of the capital, runners would go before him ordering them to bow to him, "as is his due."

When Islam rose to conquer Spain in the 8th century, its chief allies were the Jews. Often, Muslim fighters would capture an area, put the local Jews in charge, and move on to the next battlefield.

The Muslim conquest inaugurated what in Jewish history is known as the Golden Age of Spain. Two people in particular were responsible for the launching of the Golden Age. The first was the caliph Abd al-Rachmân III. The second was a physician named Chasdai Abu Yusuf Ben Yitzchak Ben Ezra ibn Shaprut, whom we know as Chisdai ibn Shaprut.

The caliph made Chisdai his personal physician; gave him control of trade in and out of the caliphate; then made him both prime minister and foreign minister - without the title, but with the caliph's full backing.

With Abd al-Rachmân's help and his blessing, Chisdai turned Muslim Spain into a major center of Jewish culture and learning on virtually every level. He literally created Sephardi Jewry.

Then there was Ismail ibn Nagrela - Sh'muel Ha-nagid. He was a rabbi; a talmudist; a renowned halachist; a grammarian; a linguist; and a poet, both of liturgical and secular poems.

And for at least two decades in the early 11th century, he also was the power behind Granada's throne; in fact, in the last years of his life, he was the caliph in everything but title.

Officially, he was the caliph's chief minister and chief of staff of his army - a Jew (a rabbi, no less) in charge of a Muslim army. He spent 18 years on the battlefield, never losing to the enemy. (He died of natural causes during his last campaign.)  Shmuel Ha-nagid's son and successor Joseph ibn Naghrela - Joseph Ha-nagid - did not fare as well; he was ultimately killed by radicalized Islamists who slaughtered the Jews in Grenada.

For nearly two centuries, Jews and Muslims lived together in Spain in convivencia, a symbiotic relationship, in which each benefited from the other intellectually, culturally, and economically.

In that environment, the Jews and Muslims each produced great works of grammar, poetry, philosophy, and architecture.  As vizier, Joseph Hanagid as vizier, for example, built the earliest section of Granada's Alhambra palace.

Does this sound like millennia-old hatred and warfare between Muslims and Jews? No.

Did we always get along? Sadly, no.

Were there times when crazy caliphs made the lives of Jews hell on earth? Sadly, yes.

But millennia-old hatred and warfare? No. Not even close. And that probably is why for the first seven centuries after Islam came into existence, the majority of Jews in the world preferred to live in Muslim lands, not Christian ones.

In Christian Europe, Jews were brutalized, tortured, and killed as a matter of public policy. For century after century, Jews were denied livelihoods, forced to live in ghettoes, robbed on a regular basis. And killed.

This version of Jewish-Muslim relations no longer exists. It was destroyed by a Big Lie, one that began at the end of the 19th century, when we actively began to reclaim our ancient home acre by acre, dunam by dunam.

The Christian world was not pleased. A return to the Land was an affront to Christian theology. Christendom was the "New Israel," the "Old Israel" would never rise again, and the Jews had to be kept on the most servile rungs of society as witness to the truth of it all.

Certainly, the French were not pleased. In fact, the first version of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to be translated into Arabic came from the October 21, 1920 issue of the Newspaper, La Vielle France, even though it was a known fraud by then. They printed up thousands of copies of the translated text, and distributed those texts free throughout the Arab world.

Then the French, and the British too, mounted a campaign to convince the Arabs the Jews were coming to steal their land and enslave them. They used almost the exact same words we find today in Hamas' charter.

The so-called thousands of years of hatred and warfare between the Jews and the Arabs actually is a little over 100 years old, fueled by Christian anti-Semitism, not enmity between Isaac and Ishmael.

The more we hear journalists, pundits, and politicians talk about the millennia-old hatred between Jews and Arabs, both before Islam and after, the more that falsehood becomes truth, and the truth becomes falsehood.

It is easy to dismiss the above facts as ancient history; to dismiss it all as irrelevant because the facts on the ground have made them irrelevant. The Spanish philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I would add that those who dismiss the past as irrelevant also are doomed to repeat it.

Truth is never irrelevant.

That finally brings me to my point, which is to examine how the Big Lie keeps the Palestinians and the Israelis from giving peace a chance.

The Big Lie comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes. We have dealt with Big Lie No. 1.

Now for Big Lie No. 2: From the time the Jews were exiled by the Romans until the end of the 19th century, there were hardly any Jews in Palestine.

Not true. The Hebrew word chalukah means "distribution," and it was the word used to describe the collection of funds in the Diaspora for the support of the Yishuv, the Jewish Settlement in Palestine. When we hear the word Yishuv, we think of early 20th century Jewish history, but from the Roman era onwards, there was always a Yishuv and it was always called the Yishuv.

In the 19th century, Jerusalem had over 15,000 Jews living in it. Late in that century, a British census showed that Jews made up the majority in Jerusalem.

Big Lie No. 3: Israel, we are told over and again, illegally seized Palestinian land in 1967 and has illegally occupied it ever since.

Not true.

For one thing, Israel struck first, but it did not start the Six-Day War; the Arabs did. Egypt did. For another, Israel pleaded with Jordan to stay out of the war. It even sent Golda Meir on a secret mission to Amman to meet with King Hussein. It was to no avail. Hussein sent his air force to attack Israeli positions, and he put units of the Arab Legion on the Mandelbaum Gate to fire on West Jerusalem.

After the war, Israel wanted to give it all back, but the Arab League, meeting in Khartoum, issued its infamous "three no's": "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel."

You do not hear about that much any more; except from the more right leaning Israel supporters.

All you hear is that Israel illegally invaded and illegally occupied. More about the alleged illegality below.

Big Lie No. 4: Israel has prevented the Palestinians from establishing a state of their own.

Not true. On Nov. 29, 1947, the U.N. General Assembly created two Palestinian states: a Palestinian Jewish state and a Palestinian Arab state. The Yishuv accepted that two-state solution. The Arabs rejected it.

In the war that followed, Egypt occupied Gaza, Jordan occupied the west bank, and Syria seized the Golan. For 19 years, the land was illegally occupied by Arab states. For 19 years, a Palestinian Arab state was there for the founding. It was never born because Arab states stole the land from the Palestinians.

You never hear that anymore, either. The Big Lie is more important than the truth.

For sure, Israel, by its presence on the west bank, does stand in the way of a Palestinian state being created today. That is an overly simplistic view, however.

Thief No. 1 breaks into a house and steals a television set. Thief No. 2 breaks into the home of Thief No. 1 and steals that same television set. The police raid the home of Thief No. 2 and recover the set. Do they return it to Thief No. 1? The idea is absurd. The set would be returned to its legal owner, except that the legal owner cannot be found.

A series of foreign powers seized and then controlled all of Palestine, including the west bank and Gaza, for two millennia. After World War I, the region was administered by the British, who left on May 14, 1948. Jordan then illegally occupied the west bank, and Egypt occupied Gaza. Israel, in this case, stands in for the police in the television set scenario. It “recovered” the "stolen property," but there was no legal owner to be found. Until a "legal" owner does appear, there is no one to whom to return the land. (This is why Israel prefers the term "administered territories," rather than the ever-popular "occupied territories." It is administering the territories until their owner can be identified.)

Supposedly, the Palestinians are the "legal owner," although "Palestinian" as a national identity is less than a hundred years old (no one ever mentions that, either). Yet they have been unable to produce a stable government. They also are unable, or unwilling, to prevent terrorists from using their territory as a launching pad for attacks on Israel. Most significant, they have leaders who say the right things in English (we want to live in peace with Israel) and the wrong things in Arabic (today the west bank, tomorrow all of Palestine). The late unlamented Yasir Arafat was a master of such double-speak, but Mahmoud Abbas has been known to do the same.

This brings us to Big Lie No. 5: The Jews have no real legal claim to the land.

Not true.

Before the Jewish state came into existence on May 15, 1948, the last legitimate native government on that land was the Jewish state created 2,200 years earlier by Judah Maccabee and his brothers.

From the fall of that state to Rome until the creation of the State of Israel 66 years ago, there was no legitimate native government on the soil of the entire Land of Israel, which was part of the territory the Romans had renamed Palestine.

In essence, land illegally occupied for 2,000 years was finally returned to the successors of the last legitimate native government that existed there. (This, by the way, would make Israel the actual "original legal owner" of that stolen television set, meaning at the very least the west bank.)

A poll this summer reported that a majority of Jews age 30 and under opposed Operation Protective Edge, and were embarrassed by what they saw as Israel's immoral actions.

In New York and throughout the country, there were demonstrations organized by Jews against Israel,. One fringe Jewish group even staged a "die-in" at the offices of the Friends of the IDF in midtown Manhattan.

These people simply do not know the facts, or have been coopted by a mindset already fixated on opposition to Israel. What army in the world ever gave people a half-hour's warning to seek shelter before it struck strategic targets? Are the United States and its allies doing what the IDF did for the Gazan people, phoning, leafleting texting and "knocking" on the roofs before it bombs ISIS targets? Only Israel ever did such a thing.

And to the shame of Islam, in the name of which Hamas acts, Hamas forced people to stay in their homes, so they could die, so the death toll would mount, so Israel would be made to look immoral and genocidal.

Jews have nothing to be ashamed of in the Gaza war.

Israel has nothing to be ashamed of in the Gaza war.

Israel caused death and destruction in Gaza, true, and it grieves us, or it should grieve us. Israel, however, is not responsible for those deaths or that destruction.

Hamas is responsible.

Hundreds of missiles fired at Sderot, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Tel Aviv in a single month are responsible.

Building a series of tunnels to invade Israeli towns and villages in order to kill Jews is responsible.

In building these tunnels, Hamas also forced children to dig and killed the builders so no one could leak the locations to Israel; with no human rights violation charges claimed against Hamas.  This is who Hamas truly is.

Then there is Big Lie No. 6: Israel, in its aerial war against Gaza, violated international law and committed war crimes.

On September 23, the world woke up to the news that the United States was carrying out air strikes on suspected terrorist cells in Syria. The reason, the news reports said, was because there was credible information that the targeted groups, belonging to ISIS and al Qaeda, posed an imminent direct threat to the United States.

The United States bombed, and the West cheered.

The groups targeted beginning on September 23 are in Syria, many thousands of miles away from the American homeland.

An imminent threat is a threat that has not happened, and God-willing never will.

Israel did not face an imminent threat from some faraway terrorist gang. Hamas is right there on its southern flank, and in the months before Israel sent its military into Gaza, Hamas had already attacked Israel many hundreds of times with its missiles. Thank God for Iron Dome.

Until today, no American children have been forced to live in bomb shelters because of ISIS, or al Qaeda. Israeli children in the south were forced to live in bomb shelters most of every day for months because of Hamas and its missiles.

For acting against an imminent threat, the United States is praised, to the credit of the world.  There has not been much, if any, news reported on the damage and death America is causing to non military targets in Iraq and Syria.

For acting against an actual attack, Israel is condemned, to the shame of the world.

Talk about double standards. The top U.N. investigator for Gaza, William Schabas, openly admitted that the UN holds a double standard in regard to Israel and war crimes.

Britain, perhaps, stands out in the double-standard category. On September 26, at the urging of Prime Minister David Cameron, Britain's parliament overwhelmingly voted to set British warplanes into the skies over Iraq. "These people want to kill us," Cameron told NBC News anchor Brian Williams. "They've got us in their sights and we have put together this coalition...to make sure that we ultimately destroy this evil organization."

To another interviewer, he said, "We have a need to act in our own national interest to protect our people and our society."

During the Gaza war, however, Cameron and his government did not think Israel had the right to act in its own national interest to protect its people and its society. “We are currently reviewing all export licenses to Israel to confirm that we think they are appropriate,” a spokeswoman for Cameron announced on August 4.

True, Cameron's government was not overly pressing suspension of arms sales to Israel, but it was being pressured by the opposition parties in Parliament to suspend them - immediately. Those same parties voted 524 to 43 in favor of doing to faraway ISIS what they objected to Israel doing to nearby Hamas.

Then there is Marie Harf, the U.S. Deputy State Department Spokesperson who said about The U.S., NATO and Ukraine taking steps against Russia after the invasion of Crimea the summer, "…there is no equivalence between countries taking steps to protect themselves, their partners, and their territories against someone who is sending arms and troops and men over the border into another country…No one's going to sit by and not stand up for our principals and say go ahead Russia, we're not going to take any steps to protect ourselves…."

Israel was not publicly given the same consideration, and was condemned, even while the instances occurred so close to one another that the duplicitous actions were fresh in the minds of those criticizing.

There is one more Big Lie that must be addressed, Big Lie No. 7: Israel never does anything wrong.

Israel has done many things wrong. Some things, it has done terribly wrong.

It has treated its own Arab citizens shabbily over the years. It has at times ignored the rule of law in dealing with Palestinians in the territories. As much as the Palestinians fail to honor agreements, Israel also fails to honor agreements.

Peace will never come to the Middle East, real peace, until truth comes to the Middle East.

Our task going forward as Jews in the diaspora is to challenge the Big Lie whenever it is spoken, wherever it is spoken, by whomever it is spoken.

Our task is to hold politicians responsible for the truth; the media responsible for the truth; the pundits and talking heads responsible for the truth.

Our task is to stand up for the truth, no matter how much people do not want to hear it, and even no matter if it hurts us; we must be as one "who stands by his oath, even to his own detriment," in the words of Psalm 15.

Our task as individuals is to stand together, united in common cause. Sitting on our hands no longer is an option, and neither is remaining unaffiliated with the Jewish community, as is the case with over half of American Jewry.

Israel is at risk and Jew-hatred is on the rise again throughout the world. You only need to open your newspapers to see how true that is. Do a Google search for the word Jew and see how true that is.

Human rights groups are lobbying government leaders in every capital of the world against Israel, and at times even against the Jews in general. Efforts, sometimes successful, in Western countries to ban ritual circumcision (Denmark, Sweden, and, for a time, Germany) and a failed effort in San Francisco, in the United States; or the kosher slaughter (Poland, Holland, Switzerland, Denmark and New Zealand) are part and parcel of this frightening trend.

Universities and the business world are being actively pushed to boycott anything Israel.

You can even buy copies of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion on Amazon.com.

Never in the last 60 years or so has it been more important for Jews to affiliate with their communities.

If ever in the last 60 years there was a need for Jews to stand together, this is the time. The old adage is nevertheless a true one: In unity there is strength.

We show that unity by belonging to the institutions that serve our community. Politicians count heads. If Jews do not affiliate - and, as noted, over half the Jews in America do not - the politicians and policy-makers see that and say the Jews do not care about Israel, and they do not even care about anything but their own individual self-interests.

Sitting outside the community is no longer an option. Joining the community is the only option.