Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) earned widespread condemnation Thursday when he said that Israel had to call new elections to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — in the middle of a war against terrorists.
But Schumer went further, naming Netanyahu as one of four obstacles to peace. The other three: the Hamas terrorists who murdered 1200 people on October 7, 2023; the corrupt Palestinian Authority government; and “right-wing Israelis.”
“Right-wing Israelis” are the majority of the Israeli population, at least as represented by the last election results in 2022, which gave right-wing parties the largest majority that any coalition has enjoyed in decades.
Perhaps Schumer meant the handful of Israelis who have been sanctioned by the U.S. for something called “extremist settler violence,” while daily violence by Palestinian terrorists against “settlers” goes unsanctioned and Biden waives sanctions on Iran.
More likely, Schumer is reflecting the view, common in liberal Jewish circles, that the 500,000 or so Israelis who live in Judea and Samaria — the “West Bank” — are obstacles to peace because they are living where Palestinians say they want a state.
If there is anything that Gaza ought to teach the world, it is that settlements are not the problem. Israel removed all of its settlements from Gaza in 2005, and the result was more rockets and more terror from Palestinians.
The “right-wing Israelis” who lived in Gaza gave up their homes, their synagogues, and their farms. They were not the obstacle to peace then, and they are not the obstacle to peace now.
Schumer’s view is that “right-wing Israelis” — settlers, religious Jews, or even just secular patriots who vote conservative for other reasons — are morally equivalent to the terrorists, rapists, kidnappers, and looters of October 7.
Perhaps Schumer does not really believe that. Perhaps the White House — white later distancing itself from his remarks — cynically thought that having the top-ranking Jew in American politics attack Netanyahu and Israel was a good idea.
Whatever his motives, it is curious that Schumer has not yet passed billions of dollars in emergency aid for the war that Israel was promised by President Joe Biden, and that passed the Republican House. It is an unconscionable delay.
Some have described Schumer’s behavior as that of a “self-hating” Jew.
I have never liked the term “self-hating”; it is ugly, and it is also inaccurate. The truth is that Schumer loves himself; it’s the other, “right-wing Jews” that he hates.
Likewise with Jonathan Glazer, the film director who used his Oscar acceptance speech on Sunday to speak for those who “refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked” by Israel to justify the “occupation” and the Gaza war.
Glazer doesn’t actually have a problem with exploiting the Holocaust. He won his little gold statue for a Holocaust film, exploiting the murder of six million Jews so he could stand on a podium to disparage Jews fighting for their lives today.
Then there is Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, who was one of the only people to defend Schumer, claiming that he had only said “what the overwhelming majority of American Jews are thinking.”
That is not true. Whatever their views on Netanyahu — and many American Jews, like many Israelis, are critical of him — few Jews would approve of the U.S. interfering in Israel’s domestic politics in the middle of a war against murderous terrorists.
All of this encourages Hamas terrorists, their Iranian sponsors, and their fans throughout the Muslim world (and on American college campuses) to believe that they are winning. Perhaps is easier to stand up to “right-wing Israelis” than to angry voters in Detroit and Chicago.
Just remember: when they come for us, they don’t spare “self-hating Jews.” (They don’t even spare Israeli Arabs or Muslims.)
Thankfully, Schumer’s own electoral reckoning is coming soon: Republicans are favored to win the Senate. The only question is how much more damage he, and Biden, will do until then.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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