Zionism and the Arabs

Moshe Smilansky, a founder of Rehovot in 1890, became intimately familiar with Arabs in the country. He contended in his essay Be-Moledet (The Homeland) in 1915 that, the Arab would succumb “if he senses you have power … and maintain his hatred for you in his heart.” Facing a harsh reality, the dreaded sea and its waves, there was no alternative to “jumping into the sea, and blessed be that jump for all times.”

Yitzhak Epstein, an educator in the Galilee, pondered the Arab question in his lecture The Hidden Question from 1907. Epstein warned that the Arab is rooted in the land and bound to his village; and he will not gingerly leave when Jews purchase the land where he tills the soil, wander elsewhere, abandoning the graves of his fathers.

Yosef Haim Brenner, a noteworthy author, came to the homeland arriving in Haifa in 1909. Brenner lamented when immediately encountering Arab youth: “Hatred between us [Jews and Arabs] – already exists and will exist.” His was a bitter prognosis for the future of Zionism. Brenner’s own future ended when brutally murdered by Arabs in Jaffa in 1921.

Zev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, explained in his essay The Iron Wall in 1923, that there was no possibility that Arabs would voluntarily accommodate Zionism: “there has never been an indigenous inhabitant anywhere or at any time who has ever accepted the settlement of others in his country.” Zionism needs, figuratively but perhaps also literally, an iron wall which the native population cannot break through.”

Arthur Ruppin headed settlement activities in the Galilee after arriving to Jaffa in 1908. Cognizant of obstacles on the path of Zionism, he questioned in his diary entry from January 12 whether in the long term “Zionist aspirations will be regarded as the beginning of an important historic movement or as a fantastic stupidity.” He perceived the Arabs as the biggest problem, with no hope for genuine reconciliation between the two peoples.

Shmuel Yosef Agnon, renowned Nobel-prize author, lived in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem when the countrywide Arab bloodbath burst out in 1929. He confided to his patron-publisher S. Z. Schocken: “Since the days of the riots my attitude to the Arabs had changed. My attitude is now this: I don’t hate them and I don’t love them, all I want is not to see their faces.” Separation from the Arabs was the optimal choice for the Jews.

War and the Transfer Idea

In April 1920, the Nebi Musa riots in Jerusalem left nine Jews dead and over two hundred injured; in the 1921 Jaffa riot 47 Jews were murdered; and in the pogroms of 1929—in Hebron, Jerusalem, and elsewhere—133 Jews met their brutal death. The Arab Revolt of 1936-39 accounted for approximately 500 dead Jews. British authorities concluded that Zionism was an unsettling provocation and threat to the Arab population.

The idea of Arab emigration, expulsion, or transfer surfaced in Zionist circles. Inter-communal clashes, notoriously initiated by the Arab side, signaled that the presence of two rival peoples in one tiny country was a prescription for tension and war.

Theodor Herzl, the political founder of Zionism, was an early advocate for propelling Arab migration from Palestine. His diary entry from June 12, 1895, was revelatory: “We shall try to spirit the penniless [Arab peasant] population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries whilst denying it any employment in our own country.” This was a paradigmatic formula to incentivize Arab transfer through economic measures, without the use of force.

David Ben-Gurion, later Israel’s first Prime Minister, did not shy away from the transfer of Arab tenant farmers relocating from Western Palestine to Transjordan across the river. In 1937, when the British Peel Commission recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, it also proposed the transfer of over 200,000 Arabs to the Arab state. It concluded that for Jews and Arabs “within the narrow bounds of one small country…there is no common ground between them. Their national aspirations are incompatible.” The Peel Report recognized “the gulf is wide and will continue to widen.” Ben-Gurion enthusiastically endorsed the possibility of an Arab transfer to Transjordan, or Syria and Iraq.

Berl Katznelson, the conscience of the Labor Movement, believed moreover that transfer “is the best of solutions … this must take place one of these days.” He intended Arab transfer, not to nearby Nablus, but echoing Ben-Gurion to Syria and Iraq.

Yosef Weitz, who headed the Jewish Settlement Department in pre-state years, left the following diary entry in 1940 (quoted in Davar, September 29, 1967): “…it must be clear that there is no room in this country for both peoples. The only solution is Eretz-Israel, at least the Western Israel, without Arabs, and there is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries—to transfer them all—not one village, not one tribe should be left.” This radical program of ethnic cleansing enabled Weitz to confront the elephant in the room.

Chaim Weizmann, to be Israel’s first President, opposed transfer through coercion in an article in Foreign Affairs in January 1942. He presumed that Muslims would prefer to evacuate rather than live under an “infidel” Jewish regime.

In 1947, the Arabs rejected the United Nations Partition Resolution and fighting which they initiated raged throughout the country. Arabs fled from Tiberius and Haifa in April of 1948. After the IDF captured Lod in July, Ben-Gurion visited the area and motioned to senior army officers Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan with a wave of his hand to expel the Arab inhabitants. Fear of living under Jewish rule, yet hope for a final Arab victory, impacted decisively upon thousands of departing inhabitants.

By the end of Israel’s War of Independence, about a half a million Arabs took flight and became refugees. In cases where Jews entreated Arabs to endure the situation and remain, they nonetheless packed their belongings as in Haifa and left the country. Benny Morris concluded in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, that the Arab exodus “had solved the embryonic Jewish state’s chief and agonizing political-strategic problem, the existence in it of a very large actively or potentially hostile Arab minority.”

Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first Foreign Minister, confessed to Weizmann in July 1948, that Arab flight from the fledgling state was an opportunity: “We are determined … to explore all possibilities of getting rid, once and for all, of the huge Arab minority which originally threatened us.”

Alec Kirkbride, senior adviser to the government of Transjordan in the 1920s, understood the path to conflict-resolution. He revealed in his autobiography that the British intended the area east of the river “to serve as a reserve of land for use in the resettlement of Arabs once the National Home for the Jews in Palestine, which they were pledged to support, became an accomplished fact.”

Leopold Amery, a member of the British cabinet dealing with Palestine, addressed a letter to Prime Minister Churchill in 1941: “Taking a long view the ideal policy might be to give the Jews the whole of Palestine and find the money for the transference of the existing Palestinian [Arab] population to Transjordan and Syria and its resettlement there.”

Reality caught up with Kirkbride and Amery during the years from 1948 to 1967. Approximately 250,000 Arabs—one-third of the population—migrated eastward from the West Bank to Amman, Salt, Zarka, and other Jordanian towns. This served as a temporary station for a sizable number who resettled in Kuwait, Chile, Germany, and the United States.

Edward Norman, an American philanthropist, proposed in the 1930s the resettlement of Palestinian Arabs in Iraq. The agricultural potential of Mesopotamia, filled with the waters of the Euphrates valley, could easily support a large Arab immigration. Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt had both expressed their agreement with transfer. John Gunther in his book Inside Asia considered that “something drastic must be done” in the conflict-ridden Palestine arena, mentioning the Turkey-Greece population exchange after World War I as a model to separate the warring protagonists in Palestine one from the other.

Insightful observers who had met with Herzl and aware of his Jewish state idea predicted a violent outcome, which in fact occurred in the 1948 War. Sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz mused on Herzl’s naiveté: “You want to create a state without bloodshed? Where have you ever seen such a thing? Without force and without cunning?” Sidney Whitman, an Englishman familiar with the East, magnified the Zionist quandary: “How, without dispossessing the natives [Arabs], would the Jews obtain the land they needed?” Jews would have to re-enter history with a sword in their hands.

George Antonius, employed by the British administration in Palestine, concluded in The Arab Awakening from 1938: “There is no room for a second nation in a country which is already inhabited … it is not possible to establish a Jewish state in Palestine without the forcible dislodgement of a peasantry who seem readier to face death than give up their land.” The First Arab-Israeli War in 1948 partially confirmed Antonius’s grim prognosis.

Arabs in Israel

Within the renewed Jewish state of Israel in 1948, there remained an Arab minority numbering nine per-cent of the total population, escalating to some twenty per-cent by 2025. Of the two million non-Jews seventy-five per-cent were Muslims. Israel therefore acquired the character of a Jewish-Muslim country or a Jewish-Arab country that compromised the essence of the Zionist ethos. Arab collective confidence soared, many identified as Palestinians, and many accentuated their Muslim faith. All the while, Arab citizens possess voting rights and liberty without the state demanding they fulfill obligations—neither military nor civilian service of any kind.

The Arabs in Israel experienced the benefits of life in the Jewish state. They enjoyed a state-financed Arabic-language educational stream and access to higher education entailing affirmative action criteria for Arab applicants. Job opportunities expanded over the years: nearly a third of Israel’s physicians, a quarter of the nurses, and half of the pharmacists, are Arabs. Israel’s brand of Jewish nationalism was not antithetical to accommodating a diversified and inclusive society.

Arab Knesset representation jumped from two in 1949 to 15 in 2015, dropping to 10 in 2022. Ninety-per cent of Arab voters support the three Arab parties. They all espouse the Palestinian narrative—bemoaning the ’48 Nakba catastrophe, denouncing Israel’s occupation in the post-’67 territories, and demanding an inherently irredentist Palestinian state beside Israel—all the while spouting grievances as victims of discrimination in Israel.

The Arab public, unlike the small Druze community, is decidedly anti-Zionist. Polling conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute found that more than half of the respondents reject the definition of Israel as a Jewish nation-state. Arabs do not identify with the Israel National Anthem, the Israeli flag, and Independence Day celebrations. Indeed, Independence Day is a mournful memory for the loss of Palestine, not forgiving, not forgetting. Popular folklore relates that Arab women, perhaps grandmothers of elderly women of today, would despondently say of Jews/Israelis: “Cursed are the boats that brought you here.

Arab university students in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa, protest on campuses against the Army, unfurling the Palestinian flag. This political ritual is the badge of Palestinian national sentiment in Jewish Israel. Arab citizens are notoriously prominent in crime and subversion in and against the state. Intra-Arab murders and Palestinian terror cells feature prominently. Interestingly, a report from November 2023 found that if offered citizenship in a western country, many Arabs—more than among Jews—would leave Israel.

Meanwhile, Arabs stay in Israel and parade their true political colors. In 2017, a delegation of Arab dentists from Israel attended a medical course in Bogota. Each foreign delegation sang its national anthem, but the ‘Israeli’ one refused to sing Hatikva, and chose a Palestinian Arab anthem instead. This outrageous behavior is of a piece with the call by Ra’ed Salah, heading the Islamic Movement in Israel, to hoist the flag of Islam on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Former Member of Knesset Azmi Beshara, suspected of espionage for Hezbollah in the 2006 Second Lebanese War, provided a scandalous case of Arab disloyalty. He subsequently fled Israel to Qatar to escape interrogation and arrest.

Leading Arab agitators and instigators included parliamentarians Hanin Zoabi, Ayman Odeh, and Jamal Zahalka. MK Ahmed Tibi praised “martyrdom terrorism” and defined the Land of Israel as a [Zionist] colonial phrase. In a meeting with President Reuven Rivlin in 2019, he showed unflinching arrogance. Stating: “We [Arabs] did not immigrate here [unlike the Jews]. We are the owners of this land.”

Mahmoud Darwish, the soi-disant Palestinian national poet, had earlier depicted Jews in his poem “Identity Card” as strangers destined to go away: “So leave our country, our land, our sea … Everything and leave.”

Sample polling has examined the attitude of Jewish respondents toward Arab fellow-citizens. The Israel Democracy Institute found a majority of Jews favoring revoking Arab citizenship or denying them the right to vote and sit in the Knesset. This finding converges with another disclosure from a Dahaf poll from mid-November 2023, with half of the Jewish respondents feeling that relations between the two peoples had changed for the worse since the Iron Swords War began. As reported by the A Chord social-academic organization on March 24, 2024, only about half the Jews polled believe that Arab citizens oppose violence against Jews; and 64 percent of the Jews fear for their own safety, and with greater urgency after the massacre of October 7, 2023. The absence of trust cuts to the core of the Jewish-Arab impasse.

Raymond Aron, in his 1962 book Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, could not have been more accurate: “Israelis and Palestinian Muslims [who are Israeli citizens] cannot form a single collectivity and cannot occupy the same territory: one or the other is doomed to suffer injustice.” Unless otherwise proven, the ideological deadlock is built-in and carved in stone.

Escalation and Expanding the Conflict

Beginning in 1967 an additional Arab population complicated and exacerbated the problem.

The inclusion within Israel of the Palestinians in Judea-Samaria [West Bank] and the Gaza Strip magnified the conflictual predicament between the two peoples. The Six Day War, which Israel won, burdened her with a large Palestinian community. Before the 1993 Oslo Accord and thereafter, Palestinian terrorism intensified throughout Israel: bus and restaurant bombings, car and truck rams, fire projectiles and gun shootings, stabbings and kidnappings—the gamut of ways to kill Israelis.

While demanding a Palestinian state, to implement the devious two-state solution, Palestinians aspired to the complete eradication of Israel. Faisal al-Husseini and Abu Iyad, among other nefarious PLO figures, advocated a single state solution with refugee return to forge a Palestinian majority. Indeed, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy published a report in July 2021 that found support for a two-state solution drop among Arabs with the rise of support for one state that could “reclaim all of Palestine.” The Arab Center Washington DC published an article by Samer Elchahabi “Shifting the Paradigm” in December 2023, proposing a single democratic state for Jews and Palestinians that would rent asunder the state of Israel.

Hamas, as the leading Palestinian rival to the Fatah-PLO movement, wrapped its war against Israel and the Jewish people in the Islamic idiom. The objective of Hamas as codified in Article Seven of its covenant is to kill the Jews, and fight to liberate Palestine as an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Muslim generations until Judgment Day. Article 13 put on record that “there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”

The Koran calls upon Allah “to exalt Islam above all religions” (61:9) and “to help [the Muslims] overcome the nonbelievers” (2:286). It is this mission of Islam—inflamed by hatred of the Jews—that whipped up the Palestinians to invade and attack Israel, murder and rape, dismember and mutilate, burn babies in ovens and stab to death pregnant women on October 7, 2023. This Palestinian Nazi-like barbarism is the blackest stain on Islam in modern times.

The Failure of Co-Existence

Many are the examples of tension and violence in bi-national and poly-ethnic states, as plagued Yugoslavia, South Africa, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, and Rwanda. In past decades, forced expulsion was the fate of Turks in Bulgaria, Palestinians in Kuwait, Yemenis in Saudi Arabia, and Bosnians in Serbia.

Instances of societal escalation on religious or ethnic grounds terminate at times with demographic flight, expulsion, transfer, and population exchange. After the First World War, a consensual population exchange of two million people occurred from 1922-24 between Turkey and Greece; after the Second World War, and with the Allied Powers’ agreement, eight million Germans fled, migrated, or were expelled from Poland and Czechoslovakia. In war between India and Pakistan in 1947, 15 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, fled across newly demarcated borders. In the same year over 400,000 Finns were driven from Russia and resettled in Finland. The Soviet Union forcibly transferred six million people in the years 1930-52. While hundreds of thousands of Arabs left Israel in 1948, a similar number of Jews fled Arab countries. In the 1980s, many thousands of Whites fled the insecurity of life in Zimbabwe and Zambia. Azerbaijan expelled one hundred thousand Armenians from the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in the war of 2023 in the southern Caucasus. Since 2022 and Russia’s war against the Ukraine, six million Ukrainians left their country for Hungary and Poland and other destinations; another eight million were displaced within. Unrest and warfare in Afghanistan led to refugee flight of more than five million people to Iran and Pakistan. Fear and hope sometimes alternate or intertwine to trigger a flood of human displacement.

Economic motives have played a role in encouraging migration. More than three million Indians sought work in the United Arab Emirates. Mass Muslim migration from Africa, the Middle East, and southern Asia swamped Europe. A reckoning with illegal immigration to America is a central pillar in President Trump’s program in the years ahead.

Promoting Emigration

Yitzhak Rabin, IDF Chief-of-Staff and later Israel’s Prime Minister, proposed in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv on February 16, 1973 a solution for Gazan refugees on the East Bank of the Jordan: “We [Israel] can bring about a population movement [of Arabs] on a basis other than through the use of force. I want to create conditions such that…there will be a natural population migration to the East Bank.” Speaking on BBC TV on May 1 the same year, Moshe Dayan was blunt: “Israel should remain for eternity and until the end of time in the West Bank … If Palestinians didn’t like this they could go and establish themselves in an Arab country.” Writing in Breakthrough, Dayan, like Rabin, believed Jordan to be the optimal and proximate destination for Palestinian refugees. Jordan was already the home to a Palestinian-majority population.

On June 26, 2023, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research published the Arab Barometer Poll, finding that more than one-third of the Gazans and 20 per-cent of the West Bankers were considering emigrating to Turkey, Germany, Canada, and the United states, in search of economic and educational opportunities.

In February 2024, Israeli researchers Noga Arbel and Yoav Sorek outlined a plan for “Voluntary Emigration” to facilitate Gazan refugees, facing the harsh reality of the massive damage and destruction of houses and infrastructure in the war, to seek resettlement elsewhere. Transfer by consent sounds like turning a punishment into a reward.

The subject of transfer can also turn in the opposite direction. Yasser Arafat had predicted that the time would come when the Israelis will flee Palestine. He shared his hope in July 1985 with journalist Abdul Bari Atwan that he, Atwan, will live to see the day when “the Israelis would flee like rats from a sinking ship” (MEMRI, Aug. 19, 2021). Under the vice of Palestinian warfare, a frightened and demoralized Israeli society would collapse. Refugee return will usher in the demographic subversion of Jewish Israel.

Findings published in January 2025 from a global survey commissioned by the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) illustrate the profound Arab hatred of Jews blazoned across Palestinian political skies. Among all peoples and places regarding anti-Semitic attitudes, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip Palestinians ranked first in the world with a figure of 97%. In Sweden it was 5% and in Canada 8%. No country wants neighbors holding such abhorrent feelings just next door across the border. A popular refrain in Palestinian society was the rhythmic Arabic mantra Filastin biladna wa al-Yahud kilabna (Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs). The myth of a Palestinian peace partner fades away.

Toward a Solution

Admittedly, there are daily Jewish–Arab relations and interactions on various levels in Israeli society. Co-existence takes place in work environments and in mixed towns. This humanizes an otherwise conflictual situation; yet this piece of reality is nothing more than of local, anecdotal, personal and non-political significance.

Israeli government policies could create conditions to spur Arab citizens to pack up and leave:
–

In the economic field—enforcing strict tax collection.
In the security field—collecting illegal weapons.
In the cultural field—canceling affirmative action in higher education.
In the linguistic field—limit public, official, and transportation signs to the Hebrew and English languages.
In the political field—forbidding candidacy in elections to supporters of terrorism and deniers of a Jewish state.
In the social field—imposing mandatory civilian national service.

These non-violent measures are reasonable and equitable in a democratic state, accounting especially for Israel’s particular character and circumstances.

Israeli measures to promote migration eastward are doubly important regarding the Arab population in Judea and Samaria, and the Gaza Strip. Palestinians have conducted a savage terrorist war against Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers. Parading their weapons marching through Jenin in northern Samaria, with high profile exposure and chanting jihad-like slogans, is a 2025 Palestinian nightmarish reality.

The Arabs in Israel are vulnerable and walking on thin ice. They who actively operate to push the Jews out may ultimately find themselves in the dialectic twist as victims of their own demonic designs. The Arabs have forced Israel’s hand, in 1948, somewhat in 1967, partially in 2024 within Gaza. Have they learned any lesson from the past?

Until President Trump dropped his political bomb proposing to relocate Gazan Arabs out of the country, transfer was a taboo subject. Incessantly maligned was anyone who dared mention transfer, though in the past the politically mainstream Herzl, Katznelson, Sharett, Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, and Rabin, advocated in varying configurations and formulations this very idea. The idea is sound regardless of who gives voice to it.

Mordechai Nisan is a retired lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also taught at Bar-Ilan University, the Open University, and the pre-army Lachish academy at Beit Guvrin. Among his books: Minorities in the Middle East, Toward a New Israel, The Crack-up of the Israeli Left, The Conscience of Lebanon, and Identity and Civilization.

Government Response To Petition To Stop Dismissal of Ronen Bar
Dr. Aaron Lerner 24 March 2024

The response includes many strong arguments, including the following
(ChatGPT4 used to translate):

During deliberations of a joint subcommittee of the Knesset Foreign Affairs
and Defense Committee and the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee on the
proposed ISA Law, held on November 26, 2001, the committee discussed this
very issue. On page 34 of the protocol, then-Deputy Attorney General (later
Justice) Meni Mazuz explained the reasoning behind how the term of the ISA
Director was set.

He stated:

“In the previous Knesset, there was debate about the length of service for
the Director. Some MKs raised concerns about the system where a four-year
term could be extended by one year at the discretion of the government. This
could create a situation where the Director becomes beholden to the
appointing authority-whether he behaves ‘well’ or not-depending on whether
his term is extended by a few months or not.

An alternative proposal was submitted to stipulate a five-year term, unless
the government set a shorter term at the time of appointment, and that the
Director’s tenure would continue unless a replacement is appointed within
three months of the term ending-to allow for continuity and overlap. But the
main idea was to establish a fixed term.”

At that point, MK Yuval Steinitz interjected:

“Anyway, the Prime Minister can always fire the Director.”

Mazuz replied:

“Correct. That’s the additional point. We wrote explicitly in the law: ‘The
Director’s tenure may end under the following circumstances.'”

Chairman David Magen added:

“That sounds appropriate-five years and three months.”

Mazuz concluded:

“Instead of listing detailed grounds for termination, we included a general
clause: the government-not the Prime Minister-may terminate the Director’s
tenure before the end of the term. Without needing to cite reasons A, B, or
C. The underlying assumption is that the ISA Director, like several other
key positions, cannot remain in office without the confidence of the
government.”

Steinitz emphasized:

“Sometimes urgency demands action, and therefore the Prime Minister must
have the power to immediately suspend the Director, even before the
government acts formally.”

Mazuz confirmed:

“The government appoints based on the Prime Minister’s recommendation, so
dismissal can also be initiated that way. If necessary, the PM can even
convene an urgent session by phone vote.”

.This discussion is recorded in the committee protocol dated 26/11/2001.

Justice Mazuz’s remarks highlight the logic behind why the law does not list
specific grounds for dismissal. It is based on a clear, democratic
understanding: the ISA Director, due to the importance and sensitivity of
his role, cannot serve without the confidence of the appointing
authority-the government. Therefore, the government may dismiss the ISA
Director even via telephone vote, according to Section 19A of the
Government’s Rules of Procedure.
===

The response concludes with a request that the Honorable Court deny the
petition,

Purim is hardly over, and the true faces of the haters and loathers have already been revealed.

Michael Kuttner

Not so long ago, it was considered best to hide behind a mask and express slanderous incitement against Jews anonymously. Those days are now well and truly gone. Instead, we face openly expressed verbal and physical violence of the most pernicious kind.

The responses to this tsunami vary from genuine shock to bored indifference. The setting up of more commissions and committees is an exercise in futility. The perpetrators know this and that is why they are not deterred. Increases in punitive penalties sound great, but unless they are actually enforced by the police and judiciary, they also are mere window dressing.

As has been mentioned on more than one occasion, the introduction of the compulsory teaching of Holocaust studies in high schools would be a critical first step. Today, a generation of teenagers graduate from high schools without the faintest idea or knowledge about what Jew hate is all about and without the ability to counter this scourge.

Proof that ignorance about the Shoah years is rampant was provided in a news report that surfaced this week. A 16-year-old student in the USA who is a bright individual, a great sportsman and level-headed was caught drawing a swastika. It transpired after close grilling that this guy had no idea what the swastika represented, its sinister meaning and how it factored into the story of the Nazi period. In fact, on further probing, he admitted that he knew nothing about those years, had never met a Jewish person and even had no idea who Hitler was.

When faced with the actual facts, he was aghast. Instead of punishing him, the enlightened authorities decided that a far better course of action would be to have him mentored by a Rabbi. This proved to be an astounding success, and this young man not only now realizes how fatal his previous ignorance had been but now feels he is much better equipped to counter hate and incitement against Jews.

It is obvious that the sooner youngsters are exposed to the truth and learn about historical events the better. Prattling politicians who peddle useless panaceas should be told that the first step must be an inoculation of knowledge, especially during formative teenage years.

The continued refusal to implement this is a scandalous situation. A demand for immediate action should be at the top of the agenda. Now is the time to act with Yom Hashoah fast approaching and the usual annual and banal political rhetoric about to be unleashed.

This year, the knee-jerk Israel haters at the UN did not wait for Purim to end before firing off the latest volley of anti Israel resolutions and accusations. In fact the festivities had not even commenced as the misnamed UN Human Rights Council trundled out its knee-jerk condemnations.

Once again, Israel is accused of further “war crimes” in Gaza. This time around, according to the fetid minds of delegates on the Council, the heinous Israelis are “destroying the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza.”  Once upon a time,e Jews were accused of poisoning wells and killing Christian babies in order to make unleavened bread for Passover. This updated version has Jews deliberately destroying IVF clinics in an alleged devilish plot to prevent Palestinian babies from being born.

Nobody, of course, questioned why Hamas terrorists hide in hospitals and clinics and embed themselves among civilians. It’s much easier and more convenient to target Jews with outlandish libels. The brain-addled masses and the media can always be relied upon to spread these mistruths, knowing full well that once unleashed, they will take off.

Meanwhile, real and horrific war crimes are being committed in Syria, Iran, Sudan and parts of Africa without attracting any resolutions of censure from the UN and its associated corrupt institutions. The old adage that if it doesn’t involve Jews, it’s not news holds true.

In actual fact, the persecution of Christians in parts of Africa by jihadist fanatics has reached epidemic proportions. The silence of Church leaders in the face of this Islamic onslaught has been highlighted by the Chief Rabbi of South Africa. In a hard-hitting video, he denounced the hypocrisy of the South African Government and the resounding silence of Churches. This mass refusal to confront the rising tide of jihadist violence and murder against Africa’s Christians is scandalous.

The contrast between the selective outrage at each and every Israeli act of self-defence and the cowardly silence in the face of real jihadist genocidal actions exposes the realities behind the masks.

Recently, apologists for Palestinian Arab President Abbas lauded his supposed decision to stop “pay for slay” stipends to murderers of Israelis. Those not mesmerized by appeasement mirages knew that his declaration was merely designed to avert pressure from the US Administration. Lo and behold, it has just been revealed by Palestine Media Watch (PMW) that the Ramallah-based kleptocracy has paid out February’s instalment. In other words, as predicted, nothing has changed.

Needless to say this ongoing charade has attracted no attention from the world’s media or the UN Human Rights Council.

In what could qualify for the top prize in any Purim “shpiel”, the Russian Foreign Minister has demanded that the US cease its military action against the Houthis and instead engage in “dialogue.” Coming from the representative of a country that invaded Ukraine and continues to attack its territory, this piece of chutzpadik advice is hypocrisy in full bloom.

Time and again, those who suffer from the genetic defect of self-loathing manage to unmask themselves and reveal their true agendas.

They masquerade as anti-Zionists and protest that the return to Zion has nothing to do with Judaism. Whether adherents of Haredi sects awaiting the messianic age or disaffected individuals with an extreme secular left axe to grind, they are all united in hating the resurrected Jewish nation.

Just when one thinks that these groups and individuals can’t sink any lower, they manage to demonstrate that, indeed, it is possible to plumb new depths.

Four incidents this past week illustrate how easy it is for real intentions to be unmasked.

Popping out of the woodwork just in time for Purim were the opinions of several loathers, primarily in the USA, who condemned the celebration of this Jewish anniversary. Their general theme was to denigrate the Purim episode because “it celebrated retribution by Jews against Persians.” Stripped down to its bare meaning, their message of how Jews fought back and defended themselves against genocidal designs is intrinsically evil.

The corollary of these confused and ashamed Jews is, therefore, easily transferred onto today’s Jews/Israelis who are fighting back against terror schemes. It takes sick minds to twist the Purim story this way, but that is what passes for blind anti-Zionist/Israel paranoia. How else does one explain the establishment in the US of “anti Zionist” places of worship where so-called spiritual leaders propagate the belief that Israel has no connection to Judaism?

The second incident was the antics of those such as the misnamed “Jewish Voice for Peace” who invaded the lobby of a Trump hotel and who demonstrated against deporting foreign agitators who lead anti Israel/Jewish riots at universities. It never ceases to amaze when one sees rioting Jews defending the rights of Hamas and terror supporters while they remain mute when Israelis/Jews are massacred by these same groups. The media love the sight of these loathers with their masks and keffiyehs. They make great visual headlines, especially when they are besmirching Zionists.

The third “shande” (Yiddish for disgrace) was a viral video of Haredi youth at a wedding in Israel of a fellow Yeshiva student, singing and dancing against the IDF and defending the country. Urged on by the Yeshiva head and father of the Chatan (groom), this mass display of self-loathing for the very country that pays their stipends and supports their institutions caused a massive reaction of revulsion by all who viewed the video.

The fourth example of unhinged loathing was revealed in a report from the New York Post.

A Hollywood actress, Debra Winger, declared to Al Jazeera during an anti-Trump protest in New York that she has “a debt to pay” for having been born Jewish. “I was brought up Jewish with a lot of things that were untrue. I had to unlearn them and it’s taken a lot of years. I have a debt for what I grew up with and believed on what the State of Israel has done and what they haven’t done and how they are conflating Judaism with Zionism.”

In case her convoluted message was not clear enough, she rejected the idea of Israel as a Jewish homeland and added that she considered the US Administration as a fascist regime.

This is not the first time that so-called Jewish Hollywood elites have been unmasked as ignoramuses about Israel and Judaism.

We have been inflicted with these types throughout our long history.

The best response is to expose them and make sure that their warped narratives are countered.