Letter: Israel is Not America. Respect That Fact.

Dear Letter to the Editor:

It is disappointing that so many Jews and Jewish organizations in America have completely lost sight of the existential difference between Jewish life in America and Jewish life in Israel. 

Since November 30, 1947 — the day the Arabs for the first of many times since 1947 rejected a two state solution – over 27,000 Jews have been — to use the terminology of Palestinian Arab leader and Nazi war criminal the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini– murdered because they were Jewish. That’s 360 Jews murdered every year for 75 years because they were Jewish. That’s nearly one Jew murdered every day in Israel for 75 years because he or she was Jewish.

It is unlikely that in America over the last 75 years more than 40 Jews were murdered because they were Jewish.

Yet these American Jews and Jewish organizations act as if a Jewish electorate where 360 Jews are murdered every year for 75 years because they were Jewish would have the identical existential concerns as a Jewish electorate where .53 Jews are murdered every year for the last 75 years because they were Jewish.

While liberal Jews in Westchester, Chevy Chase, Georgetown, Westwood, Walnut Creek and Boca Raton are safely sipping chardonnay and pontificating how they don’t understand how Jews in Israel don’t vote as they think they should, those Jews in Israel are watching every week as their Jewish neighbors are murdered by psychopathic Muslims with guns, knives and ramming cars.

Let’s not forget the fact that since 1979 the mad mullahs who rule Iran have very publicly declared their overriding foreign policy goal is the annihilation of the Jewish population of Israel. Recently those mad mullahs have proudly announced that they have reached 84% nuclear enrichment when less than 4% is needed for peaceful use.

A vastly different existential existence in Israel produces an electorate whose majority may actually reflect that difference… in terms of the individuals that they elect and the reforms that they support.

It is actually more than disappointing that so many Jews in America whose views of Judaism are only able to mirror their own safe minimally religious existence in America are unable to respect the fact that Israel … that place that reflects the singular foundational narrative of the Jewish Bible (the Return to Zion)… is not America.

Richard Sherman
Margate, Florida