By now we’re all too familiar with the woke litany of white privilege; all white people are irredeemably racist oppressors; all people of color are eternally victims; people of color can’t be racist because being racist depends on having power and non-whites have none. (This latter should come as news to the Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives, as well as the Mayors of New York, Chicago, and other major cities, the Lieutenant Governors of Virginia and North Carolina, etc.)
A corollary to this ludicrous philosophy is that Jews, who are often considered to be “white adjacent,” notwithstanding that a majority of Israeli Jews are themselves people of color from the Middle East or North Africa, are labeled as oppressors having “Jewish privilege.” What, pray tell, is Jewish privilege? The privilege of being persecuted for millennia? Our temporary economic success in America, which is increasingly being rolled back as the tide of DEI pushes Jews out of corporate America and universities, making it increasingly difficult to be accepted into medical, law, or other professional schools? The privilege of being assaulted on the streets of our major cities and the campuses of our elite universities? As John Stossel would say, “Give me a break!”
In fact, I submit that the real racial privilege in operation today is Palestinian privilege. Before proceeding we should emphasize that unlike the Leftist myth that all whites, even the poorest of the poor in Appalachia, benefit from “white privilege,” in the case of Palestinians the main beneficiaries are their leaders who live in luxury in Qatar and elsewhere on funds skimmed from the billions of dollars in alms they receive from the U.S., the European Union, and other guilt-ridden parties. Let me cite a few examples:
- Of all the refugee populations in recent history, only the Palestinians have their own dedicated United Nations relief agency, UNRWA, which serves to keep them permanently in refugee camps awaiting their triumphant return to the land of Israel. All others come under the aegis of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and are resettled in countries that will accept them. There are countries willing to accept Palestinian immigrants, but that solution is unacceptable to the UN and most of its member nations.
Moreover, only the Palestinians are able to inherit refugee status from one generation to the next. Very few of the Arabs who left the Palestine Mandate (Eretz Yisrael) at the urging of their leaders to make room for the invading armies that were expected to drive the Jews into the Mediterranean remain alive. Today’s “Palestinian refugees” are largely their descendants to the fourth and even fifth generations.
- Besides keeping the Palestinian “refugees” in squalor, UNRWA works hand-in-hand with their leaders in making their facilities available for storing weapons, in teaching Palestinian children from kindergarten on to hate Jews and want to kill and be killed as “holy” martyrs, providing the hate-filled textbooks they use, and employing members of Hamas as teachers. Some UNRWA employees and affiliates even participated in the slaughter of October 7, as did hundreds of “innocent” Gazan “civilians” who followed the terrorists across the border to participate in the murderous orgy.
- Palestinians in Area C, which under the Oslo accords is supposed to be under Israeli security control, are building thousands of illegal structures funded by the European Union in order to encircle and cut off the Israeli “settlements” in Judea and Samaria in preparation for the expulsion of the half million Israelis living beyond the green line, to be aided by American sanctions. They even destroy or discard any Jewish artifacts they find to promote their fiction that Jews have no connections to the Holy Land, with the full cooperation of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which has declared everything from the Temple Mount to the Cave of Machpelah outside Hebron, where our Patriarchs and Matriarchs are buried, as “Palestinian historic sites.” The Israeli government has allowed these practices to proceed virtually unopposed, presumably fearing the reaction of the Western world in the event of interference with the Palestinian project.
- In the past three years, during the Biden administration, Palestinian privilege has been elevated to new heights. The U.S. State Department, staffed with anti-Zionist activists at the upper levels, has appropriated funds for investigating supposed Israeli misconduct in Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank). The policy on Israeli “settlements” has reverted back from the Trump policy that they aren’t illegal under international law, and, some say, even from Trump’s predecessors, to the Carter administration policy that they are illegal. The Biden administration, alleging widespread “settler violence,” (most of which is actually self-defense against Palestinian attackers) has begun sanctioning individuals and communities, with the full cooperation of Israeli banks in de-banking these people.
- In academia, the delegitimization of Israel is proceeding apace, led by the elite universities, especially by Departments of Middle East Studies, which are largely funded by Qatar. Every Palestinian-inspired accusation of Israeli “genocide,” (even though the Palestinian population has increased sevenfold since 1948) is breathlessly reported and amplified by both the global and American media, and even when the lies are disproved, as in the case of the false report that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza when in fact the explosion was the result of a rocket fired by the Palestinians fell short of its target in Israel and landed in the parking lot (not to mention that the casualty figures were inflated by a factor of ten), retractions are slow in coming, if at all. The same calumnies are now being spread by K-12 teachers across the nation, most notably in Berkeley, California, the birthplace of contemporary student radicalism. After a day or two of sympathy for the Israeli victims – as Dara Horn writes, “People love dead Jews” (just not live ones), even before the Israelis counter-attacked, the world transferred its sympathies to the Gazan civilians, even though they elected Hamas and the great majority still support terrorism and even participated in the slaughter, as previously mentioned.
- The Biden-Harris administration is increasingly working to assure the survival of Hamas, as exemplified by the Vice-President’s warning of potential consequences for Israel if it enters Rafah and most recently by abstaining, rather than vetoing, a resolution sponsored by the ten non-permanent members of the UN Security Council and supported by Russia and China, calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza for the month of Ramadan not directly linked to release of hostages leading to a permanent cease-fire. (The latter two tyrannies had earlier vetoed an American resolution that called for a cease-fire linked to hostage release.) There is widespread speculation by supporters of Israel that this action was undertaken to mollify Islamist voters in Michigan and Nevada in advance of the November elections. Going further, the administration has proposed an extraterritorial pier to supply “humanitarian aid” to Gaza under the control of Hamas’ ally Qatar, which assures that it will be used to smuggle jihadis and advanced weapons to the terrorists.
- The UN Secretary-General, while deploring the October 7 atrocities, said they didn’t happen in a vacuum, implying that they were justified by Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.
- President Biden, after initially expressing doubt about Hamas’s claim of 30,000 casualties, all civilian, was so chastised on every side that he now accepts all such claims as gospel truth. He now says that Israel has “gone too far” while failing to acknowledge that Israel’s ratio of civilians to terrorist fighters killed is scarcely more than 1:1, the lowest such ratio in modern history, and experienced field commanders such as British Colonel Richard Kemp, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, who served two tours in Iraq and has made two visits to Gaza during the current war to observe operations there, assert that the IDF is the most moral army in the world, exceeding even the US and the UK in its efforts to minimize civilian casualties.
To summarize, the Biden administration appears to be committed to Hamas’ survival. Will the American Jewish community commit to the Biden administration’s political survival?
