Exclusive: ZOA Blasts Reform Jewish Leader’s Demand that Israel Accept Hostile Palestinian ‘Terrorist State’

In this Dec. 14, 2014, file photo, masked Palestinian gunmen of the Hamas militant group h
AP Photo/Khalil Hamra
Joshua Klein

President of the Union for Reform Judaism Rabbi Rick Jacobs has been persistently wrong on countless issues concerning the Jewish state, according to Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) head Morton Klein, who slammed the Reform leader’s recent calls in support of a Palestinian state — which is widely feared to pose an existential threat to Israel’s existence — comparing the heeding of Jacob’s views on Israel to “hiring a lawyer who’s never won a case.”

In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News on Sunday, Klein, who has led the nation’s oldest pro-Israel group for more than thirty years, accused the Reform movement head of consistently erring on crucial issues.

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“Reform Judaism’s President Rabbi Rick Jacobs was wrong about supporting [former PLO leader Yasser] Arafat’s dangerous Oslo Accords [and] was wrong about supporting the dangerous Gaza withdrawal, forcibly throwing out 10,000 Jews from their homes,” he stated.

The failed 1993 Oslo Accords, which gave control over most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the Palestinians, were met with Palestinian rejection and years of terror despite promising peace for Israelis. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently referred to the agreements as “the mother of all sins.”

In 2005, Israel completely “disengaged” from Gaza, uprooting thousands of Jews and razing existing Israeli settlements, effectively giving Gazans virtual autonomy over the strip. However, Palestinians largely viewed the move as a retreat under violent pressure, reinforcing groups like Hamas who claimed their tactics were effective. The perception likely influenced Hamas’s electoral victory in early 2006, as they campaigned on having expelled Israel through force. 

Post-withdrawal, attacks on Israel persisted, with terrorists firing missiles at and carrying out of suicide bombings against civilian population centers within the Jewish state, and culminating in last year’s October 7 massacre — the deadliest attack against Jewish people since the Nazi Holocaust.  

The multi-pronged October attack saw some 3,000 terrorists burst into Israel by land, sea, and air and gun down participants at an outdoor music festival while others went door to door hunting for Jewish men, women, and children in local towns who were then subject to torture, rape, execution, immolation, and kidnapping.

The massacre, which drew parallels to scenes from the Nazi-era Holocaust, resulted in more than 1,200 dead inside the Jewish state, over 5,300 more wounded, and at least 241 hostages of all ages taken — of which nearly 130 remain captive.

The vast majority of the victims are civilians and include dozens of American citizens.

According to Klein, Jacobs was also wrong about his previous support and defense of the “antisemitic, Israel-bashing” Black Lives Matter organization, “absurdly” calling the ZOA head a “racist” and urging his removal from Jewish groups simply for “exposing the Black Lives Matters Jew-hating charter,” which refers to Israel as a genocidal apartheid state.

Following the October 7 massacre, the Black Lives Matter Chicago chapter posted a controversial pro-Hamas graphic online saying, “I stand with Palestine.” The graphic also featured a paraglider with the Palestinian flag, an obvious reference to Hamas terrorists who paraglided into a music festival in Israel and attacked the attendees.

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Previously, Klein blasted the “anti-white, antisemitic, Israelphobic” Black Lives Matters movement after a local chapter paid the bond of one of its activists accused of attempting to assassinate Jewish Louisville mayoral candidate Craig Greenburg.

Jacobs was also wrong, Klein continued, about “praising and supporting the extremist, far-left Israel-bashing J Street,” the anti-Israel organization funded by billionaire left-wing Democrat donor George Soros.

In addition, the ZOA head accused Jacobs and his fellow Reform Jewish leaders of now being “devastatingly wrong by attacking and condemning Israel’s and the Israeli people’s overwhelming opposition to a dangerous Palestinian Arab terrorist state while Jacobs strongly pleads for its establishment.” 

“Supporting and heeding Reform Rabbi Jacob’s views on Israel is like hiring a lawyer who’s never won a case,” Klein concluded.

The matter comes as the largely failed two-state solution for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — vehemently rejected by both sides — is still being pushed by President Joe Biden, who insists that it is the “only way” to ensure long-term security for both Israelis and Palestinians in a new post-Hamas Gaza.

Biden’s insistence stands despite the recent October 7 massacre, which saw the Hamas terrorist group perpetrate the brutal attack against scores of Jewish civilians, as well as widespread Palestinian support for it.

The so-called two-state solution — which calls for the creation of a Palestinian state, ostensibly in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and some eastern sections of Jerusalem, in exchange for the terror-supporting Palestinian Authority ending its conflict with Israel and living at peace with the Jewish state — has long proved to be an abject failure.

Despite the numerous proposals, every Israeli attempt to offer land concessions for a Palestinian state has been met with terror waves. After years of failed negotiations and Israel’s disastrous evacuation of the Gaza Strip, which resulted in Hamas’s takeover of that territory and repeated rocket attacks from there, a growing share of Israelis have grown more skeptical of a two-state solution, largely rejecting any withdrawal from the West Bank, according to a Pew Research Center survey which took place prior to October 7, 2023. 

Since the October 7 massacre, Israelis — even more so — no longer desire a two-state solution. Additionally, the Israeli premier has vowed that he will not allow a Palestinian state as long as he remains in office.

Last month, Jacobs insisted that resolving the current conflict in Gaza “must include a peaceful Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel,” adding that “We reject the PM’s comments that undermine that essential vision.”

In a statement released late January, the Reform movement institutions called for an “end to the West Bank occupation,” and a resolution allowing for “Palestinian self-determination and self-governance,” despite admitting “that the creation of a Palestinian state will pose serious short-term security threats to Israel.” 

“We are deeply dismayed by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s recent comments dismissing the possibility of a future peaceful Palestinian state,” it read.

Earlier this month, Klein asserted that Israelis, like Americans, would never support a jihadist state on their border, slamming the Biden administration for its continued push for the creation of a hostile Palestinian state, arguing it would be a “major terrorist state,” and comparing the threat it would pose to Israel to the “Final Solution” to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

Though the Reform movement is the largest Jewish denominational group in the U.S., critics have long accused it, along with similarly progressive religious groups, of prioritizing left-wing political and social ideologies over traditional religious commitments — and in stark contrast to them — essentially undermining traditional values and challenging conventional religious institutions.

Author and scholar Rabbi Dana Evan Kaplan noted that the Reform movement became more of a “Jewish activities club” rather than a defined belief system, while suggesting its social initiatives have become “basically a mirror of the most radically leftist components of the Democratic Party platform.”

Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jklein@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.

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