JRV1312

Whose Friends Are They? Alas, Not Ours

#1312 March 8,, 2026

It’s American Jewish organizations’ role to conduct dialog with the hierarchy of American Christian denominations wrongfully demonizing Israel, but we grassroots should try to explain to their grassroots that their perception of our Jewish people’s claim to our historic homeland is fundamentally flawed. Join me in endeavoring to commence this discussion.

POP QUIZ, Girls & Boys.  Question #1, all 100 points: Who wrote this paragraph just a few months ago?

“By focusing on apartheid, we do not exclude other frameworks that can be used to analyze Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Indeed, we consider Israel’s unlawful occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip (constituting the Occupied Palestinian Territory or OPT) to be part and parcel of Israel’s apartheid regime. This report thus builds on decades of extensive work analyzing the role that business enterprises play in human rights violations as part of the Israeli occupation. Similarly, the report considers Israel’s genocidal attacks on the Gaza Strip, which at the time of writing are still ongoing, to be part of Israel’s apartheid regime. Some of the examples in this report will highlight cases of business involvement in the Gaza genocide. Regardless of any limited ceasefire agreements that may arise, or any new form of Palestinian self-governance, the work to end Israeli apartheid will continue.” [emphasis added, a little]

Focus first on the canards I italicized above:
“apartheid”
“human rights violations”
“Israeli occupation”
“Israel’s genocidal attacks”
“Israel’s apartheid regime”
“Gaza genocide”
“Israeli apartheid”

Seven smears. Not bad for a five-sentence paragraph. But that’s not the bottom line of it. “Occupation … apartheid … genocide … human rights violations” stem from, are “part and parcel,” as this document’s paragraph put it, of multiple “frameworks that can be used to analyze Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.” Per this document paragraph, it’s Israel’s illegitimate claim to its heart & soul, historic Jerusalem and defensible Judea-Samaria biblical hill country heartland, that’s the root cause of “Israel’s [mal]treatment of Palestinians.” To wit, it’s

“Israel’s unlawful occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip (constituting the Occupied Palestinian Territory or OPT)”

 that’s “part and parcel of Israel’s apartheid regime.”

This wasn’t Israel’s avowed Mideast enemies (Palestinian Arabs, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis …) who wrote this, but a highly respected, otherwise force for good American Christian denomination that wrote this last October. We American Jews cannot let this false damning indictment of our Jewish people’s historic homeland stand without confronting it. 

Here’s who wrote this: the Action Center for Corporate Accountability of the American Friends’ Service Committee (AFSC) of the Quaker denomination, in an October 2025 document titled The Business of Apartheid: What Companies and Investors Should Know. The cover graphic displays beneath the title in English and Arabic, “No to Apartheid” and “No to Annexation,” so add that last to the Seven Deadly Israeli Sins I extracted above.

The more’s the pity, given, as Google’s AI [google “American Jewish organizations Quakers”] puts it, that “during and after WWII, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) worked extensively with Jewish organizations, such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), to rescue Jewish refugees and children from Nazi-occupied Europe.”

But today, as Google goes on, “many mainstream Jewish organizations criticized the AFSC for supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.”

It’s these mainstream American Jewish organizations’ task to conduct dialog with the Quaker denomination’s hierarchy regarding Israel’s claim to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem.

What’s Left for Us Grassroots?

So what’s left for us American Jewish grassroots?  Our “Confronting Jewish Issues.com” website’s “Grassroots American Jewish Street,” unaffiliated with any organization, is a place for us ordinary American Jews to express our beliefs and our views on our own.  What I’d like us to do, in furtherance of President Trump’s urging us to “be proud of who you are,” is engage, not the Quaker denomination’s hierarchy and its AFSC, but individual Quakers who are grassroots like us, and not, not yet anyway, on “apartheid, genocide, etc.,” but on their tragically mistaken underlying presupposition that Palestinian Arabs, who’ve never ruled Palestine ever, have a stronger claim to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem than us Jews.

As it happens, there’s a lifelong Quaker, Dan, a member of the DeLand (Fla) Meeting. A member of the Southeastern Yearly Meeting, he has served and clerked on several of its committees. In the 1970s, he served two non-consecutive terms as yearly meeting clerk. A retired attorney, he is married to Susan Phillips Vaughen for 62 years and counting. He recently authored Back to the Books: Reimagining the Core of Our Faith in the Friends Journal. He’s in regular touch with grassroots Quaker groups. Sixty years ago, Dan was my roommate at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. I was an on-the-bimah guest at his and Susan’s Quaker Meeting House wedding, and was there fifty years later when they renewed their vows. 

Through Dan, I’d like for us to engage through our website’s “Street” with grassroots members of the Quaker faith on our respective views on our Jewish people’s homeland claim to historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria. I’d also suggest that Quakers as Christians have religious and heritage sites in the Holy Land, and that these are better accessed and secured under Jewish than Muslim control. Ultimately, if we get that far in our exchanges of views, I’d suggest that their falsely branding Israel “apartheid … genocidal” etc., is a stain upon them and not upon us.

The case that I’d present to grassroots Quakers through Dan is, first, that we Jews are the land of Israel’s indigenous people, that we, not Palestinian Arabs, took on Assyrians, Babylonians, Alexander’s Seleucid successors, and four times finally Rome; that we weren’t exiled by Rome but continuously remained in the land all through the exclusively foreign (and mostly non-Arab) rule centuries, writing, as historian Parkes put it, today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds”; that despite recurrent foreign ruler massacres and European prohibition of “transport of Jews to the East,” the land’s 1948 population was c. a million Arabs (that’s all) and 600,000+ Jews, and that today’s Israel’s largest population stream is Mizrahi, Middle-eastern and North African, much of which never left the Mideast.

I’d tell the Quakers that three-quarters of Mandated Palestine is Palestinian Arab majority judenrein Jordan, created by Mandate trustee Britain in the early 1920s under a Mandate provision allowing it excise from its Jewish national home the part of Palestine east of the Jordan River, and that there was no provision in the Mandate for excising any land west of the River.  I’d tell them that in 1948 multiple Arab nations invaded for Israel’s destruction, and that that invasion was thrown back by a homeland army of homeland Jews, the acid test of a people’s entitlement to its homeland state, and that in the wake of the war started by that Arab invasion, Israel absorbed more indigenously Middle-eastern Jews displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel.

I’d tell them that during Trump’s first term, his Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and the President’s Mideast-focused team constructed an Israeli-Palestinian Arab peace plan alternative to “the two-state solution,” accepted by Israel (sidelined by the Abraham Accords), that would give Judea-Samaria-residing Palestinian Arabs internal autonomy (“less-than-a-state,” as Rabin had proposed) in larger areas than where they mainly reside, with Israel applying sovereignty to (not “annexing”) Judea-Samaria, fully, as modified in Friedman’s recent book One Jewish State.

I’d tell grassroots Quakers that the chance of Israelis meekly walking out of historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all) and Judea-Samaria heartland and handing them over to Palestinian Arabs who just last week (see our #1311) released a “Palestine constitution” ending Israel, shrinking our Jewish national home into a nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle into an indefensible Jewishly meaningless Jewish national ghetto, is nil; that every self-respecting Jew in the world regards our secure Jewish people’s homeland, Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria at its heart, as national embodiment of Never Again.

Whether we’ll sow any doubts in any grassroots Quakers’ minds that “the West Bank” and “East Jerusalem” are “Occupied Palestinian Territory,” I don’t know. But, grassroots-to-grassroots, we have to try.