JRV1292

Most Unkindest Cut of All, and How To Recover From It

#1292 October 26, 2025

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  For quite a while now, I’ve increasingly felt a mounting disrespect by political powers that be here in America for our Jewish people’s historic homeland of Israel. And now the worst has come from where I’d thought unimaginable. We U.S. Jewish grassroots have to take a sober look at where things now stand and resolve on a realistic course aimed at rectifying it.

Contempt by a Thousand Cuts

In his book One Jewish State (p. 78), President Trump’s first-term Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, labels President Obama’s instigation of United Nations Security Council resolution 2334, calling for Israeli withdrawal back to the Six Day War reversing, indefensible, largely Jewishly meaningless ceasefire lines of 1949, “the greatest betrayal of Israel by a U.S. president in history.”

I don’t disagree, but I don’t think Amb. Friedman went far enough. It was the second greatest betrayal of our whole Jewish people (the first being President Roosevelt joining with Britain during WW II and the Holocaust in being “deeply committed not to save the Jews” – see chapter 20 of Yoram Kaniuk’s bio of Yossi Harel, Commander of the Exodus, summarizing Wyman’s damning The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 ).

Proof that even the paranoid can have real enemies, here’s President Biden’s Secretary of State Blinken at AIPAC [!], per Jewish Press, 6/6/23:

“As Blinken put it: ‘As the President said on his recent trip to Israel and the West Bank last summer, a two-state solution – based on the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps – remains the best way to achieve our goal of Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace, with equal measures of security, freedom, justice, opportunity, and dignity.’”  [emphasis added]

By me, driving Israel back to the 1949 ceasefire lines, turning our desperately hard-won secure, meaningful Jewish homeland into a historic Jerusalem-less nine-miles-wide-in-the-lowland-middle national ghetto would, just the opposite, rip from our whole Jewish people, not just Israelis, all our homeland’s existing “measures of security, freedom, justice, opportunity and dignity.”

President Biden’s one-sided condemning of “settler violence,” in the face of Pay-For-Slay Palestinian Authority subsidization of preying on Jewish civilians, likewise struck me as discriminatorily against the safety of Jews.  Not to mention Kamala Harris, whose Vice Presidential job description called for her chairmanship presence on such occasions, boycotting Bibi’s duly invited address to Congress (as did my own Congressperson, Mad Dean).

My friend Stu Bykofsky posted a sound hard-hitting piece on his stubykofsky.com last week, Why New York Jews Should Reject Zohran Mamdani, which took the leading candidate for mayor of the Western world city with the largest number of Jews to task for declining to recognize Israel as a Jewish state (and threatening to arrest Israel’s prime minister should he set foot in New York).  I commented that this reflects even more poorly on us, America’s grassroots voting Jews, than on him, a sort-of “Blank the Jews, they’ll vote for us anyway.”

Most Unkindest Cut of All

Which brings me to the President of our United States who just said this:

“I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank. I will not allow it. It’s not going to happen.”

When President Trump vowed this at the end of September, I assessed in #1288 that he’d not only stabbed us – not just Israel but our Jewish people – in the back; he’d twisted the knife. The issue before Israel is whether to apply sovereignty to Judea-Samaria.  It would have been, yes, bad enough, a denial of our legal and historical right to the core of our people’s historic homeland for President Trump to have vowed against that. Compare House Speaker Mike Johnson just after: “Judea and Samaria belong to Israel.”  And Bibi just before: “This place belongs to us.”

But President Trump did not content himself with vowing that. He vowed: Israel will not “annex the West Bank.”  These pejoratives are by us dirty words, antonyms, not synonyms, of “apply sovereignty” and “Judea-Samaria” (the name in use, btw, for three thousand years, including by the UN itself in 1947). 

What drove this spite? Perhaps pique over “they won’t vote for us anyway,” but I don’t think so. My guess is President Trump’s ardent aim and desire to preserve and hopefully expand the Abraham Accords in the face of Arab warning that “West Bank annexation” would doom them.  But, whatever, the more unequivocally and emphatically President Trump vows something, the more unlikely it becomes that he’ll someday unvow it.

So What’s To Be Done Now By Us U.S. Jewish Grassroots?

First, frankly assess how we got here. I’ve cited Israeli news sources of late mixing direct quotes of Israeli officials speaking of applying sovereignty to Judea-Samaria with indirect references to their seeking West Bank annexation. But I hold us grassroots U.S. Jews to blame for decades of daily averting our eyes from these and a whole media and public speech loaded lexicon of pejoratives poisoning Western public perception of Israel.

I commend to you Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser’s recent book Betrayal: The Failure of American Jewish Leadership. They complain that “democratically elected leaders of the Jewish state can be pilloried time and again here” by American Jews.  They “call for the American Jewish community [i.e., us grassroots] to take action and hold our failing Jewish leaders and their patron donors accountable.”

Well and good, but our tasks today as grassroots American Jews don’t stop with our demanding better leaders. We have tasks of our own. So let me briefly expound upon two of them.

[1] Through empathetic if exasperated friends in the Trump administration, we need to get across respectfully to the President that “annexation” and “West Bank” are our enemies’ mischaracterizations of what’s going on there, that we have irrefutable historical, legal, indispensable and equitable (Arabs have three-quarters of Palestine, judenrein Jordan) rights to Judea-Samaria, and whether Israel refrains for now from applying sovereignty there, Trump’s calling it “West Bank annexation,” hopefully unthinkingly, mouths slurs that frankly are antisemitic.

And two codicils to this: We share the blame in decades of mouthing these slurs ourselves. And those of us who like me voted for Trump have no cause for voters’ remorse.  World Israel News, this Wednesday, 10/22/25: “The vast majority of Democrats” but only “nearly half of Republicans say the United States should recognize unilateral Palestinian statehood, according to a new poll.”

And [2] We live, whether we publicly promenade on it or not, on our grassroots American Jewish street. We need to get out there on it, manifesting pride in our peoplehood, its homeland, and our American Jewish lifestyle.

I paved a portion of my “book’s” website, our Grassroots American Jewish Street. I beseech you to join me out there on it, with photos and descriptions of us celebrating our American Jewish lifestyle – holidays, life milestones, recipes, trips with Jewish themes in them. You’d just email me stuff and I’ll post in your name. And comment on stuff that’s out there. Come blog if you like. You don’t have to agree with me. Out there right now is a “two-state solution” debate between Stu and me. We both agree not now, but he feels its international imposition is eventually inevitable, while by me Israel should bet the kibbutz, if it comes to that.