Journalist Aaron Klein’s important new book, The Late Great State of Israel: How Enemies Within and Without Threaten the Jewish Nation’s Survival, illuminates, infuriates, saddens, and cries out to both heaven and humanity.
Klein – Jerusalem bureau chief for WorldNetDaily and a weekly Jewish Press columnist – says he chose his book’s title “with a heavy heart,” in order to “awaken people to this very real possibility,” to “prod the world into pondering the unthinkable; and to shed light on the scope of the calamitous threats facing the Jewish state.”
Klein indicts the world’s governments and the global media, including the Israeli government and media, for having tried to cover up the fact that the late Yasir Arafat was a bloodthirsty terrorist; for continuing to present Fatah, under Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s right hand man, as “moderate”; for being so “entrenched in their accepted narratives that they will completely invert the truth or blindly repeat proven falsehoods … (all in order to mask) the murderous ways of their Palestinian or Arab state partners.”
I only wish those who helped President Obama craft his Cairo speech had read Klein’s book before they led (or followed) our commander-in-chief down the proverbial garden path. Actually, I wish that American Jews, nearly 80 percent of whom voted for Obama, understood how very far from fair or balanced or even historically accurate his Cairo speech really was.
Klein condemns the media for not covering certain stories – “How the U.S. knowingly funds Palestinian terrorism; how Israel and the international community legitimize the jihadist Hamas movement; how the Jewish state has already essentially forfeited the holy Temple Mount…and allowed hundreds of thousands of Arabs to live illegally on Jewish-owned land.”
According to Klein, Jerusalem, like so many European cities, now has its own “no go” areas. “Israeli police units stay off the streets” of certain “densely populated Arab neighborhoods” which, in effect, constitute a “significant terrorist apparatus … now based in eastern Jerusalem. The clear aim is to keep up a steady stream of attacks on western Jerusalem neighborhoods in order to pressure Israel into ceding eastern Jerusalem.”
Over the years, Israelis have allowed more than “100,000 Palestinian Arabs to occupy tens of thousands of illegally constructed housing units in eastern and northern Jerusalem.” Criminals, mercenaries, soldiers dressed as civilians, human bombs and their terrorist handlers, may all live among them. This illegal occupation or settlement activity began long after the 1967 Six-Day War. These Palestinian Arab immigrants were not living in these places before 1948 or 1967. Indeed, Klein documents that under Jordanian rule, one of these Jerusalem neighborhoods, Shoafat, was actually a forest.
These crowded Palestinian housing complexes, schools and villas are filled with weapons and fighters. Worse still: According to Klein, these Palestinian Arabs have built illegal settlements on land owned by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which was entrusted to buy land for Jews in the Holy Land.
No one has ever exposed or opposed these illegal settlements on JNF land. Not the Israeli government, not the Israeli media, not the world media, not any of the world’s activists who demonize only Jewish settlements.
Many good Jews believe in the importance of treating the stranger in our gate with kindness, fairness. In the past, I too wanted full citizenship as well as existential and “identity” rights for Palestinian Arabs. I signed petitions and demonstrated for a “two state solution” for years. I was both a dreamer and a fool, tricked by master propagandists and by my own desire to do good.
To paraphrase my friend and colleague the Israeli leftist writer Yoram Kiniuk: “My peace partner, with whom I was dancing, turned out to be a suicide bomber.”
All things being equal, most Israelis would have no problem with Muslim or Christian Palestinian residents in Jerusalem or anywhere else in Israel – just as long as Jews could also live safely and openly in Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron, Amman, Cairo, Damascus, Mecca, Baghdad, Tehran, etc. That is, without armored troops to accompany them to and from peaceful prayer services or to the market to buy fruits and vegetables.
It is precisely this lack of reciprocity that causes the blood to boil, especially when our leaders – President Obama, for starters – fail to mention and refuse to criticize such a glaring and obvious disparity.
