JRV1327

Cries of “Genocide!” etc. Aren’t New, But They Tarnish Us All and We Must Join Israel in Standing Against Them

#1327June 21, 2026

In Israel’s unprecedented isolation, it’s more important than ever for us grassroots U.S. Jews to stand with Israelis against “genocide!” etc. canards.

Cries of “Genocide!” etc. Aren’t New, But They Tarnish Us All and We Must Join Israel in Standing Against Them

In his stirring book about the Six Day War, The Lion’s Gate, author Steven Pressfield characterizes Moshe Dayan as criticizing Eshkol, on that war for Israel’s survival’s eve, for his seeking to preserve Israel through major powers’ action to reopen the Strait of Tiran.  Israel can only be preserved into the future, Pressfield characterizes Dayan, through manifesting its ability to preserve itself on its own.

Vice President Vance’s assessment of Trump as the world’s only major leader “sympathetic” to Israel alas isn’t wrong, but Pressfield’s characterization of Dayan’s view still applies.  On the very heels of the U.S.-Iran MOU calling (inter alia) for opening Hormuz, Iran plays its Israel card – Hormuz will remain closed because of Israel’s actions in Lebanon.  Much of the world will buy it.

I write these weekly emails, one grassroots U.S. Jew to others, urging us to do what we can.  We have no direct say in military and political dealings between nations.  But accusations of “genocide by Israel” do directly affect us.  A February 2025 study, The Genocide Libel: How the World Has Charged Israel With Genocide, by the Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, points out (p. 4-5) that the lie isn’t new and tars us all.

“… Israel, unlike other states, has been charged with genocide throughout its existence. The genocide accusation is tied to charges of racism, colonialism, and other accusations leveled against Israel since the 1960’s.

“… what makes the genocide libel particularly dangerous, is the association of all Jews with the crime. Jews worldwide are all in on it, either as Zionist enablers, as dishonest back-room lobbyists, or as community leaders who, we are told, “weaponize” the charge of antisemitism to silence the truth-tellers.” [emphasis added]

So what’s incumbent upon us to do?  In chapter 2 of my book, Here & Now: U.S. Jews and the Issues Confronting Us, I tell of a question I put once to You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly.  I asked, if you’d had your choice, when and where would you have chosen to live in our people’s long history?  Would you have left home with Abraham to seek the Land that He Would Show Him?  Would you have stood with Moses at Sinai, crossed the Jordan with Joshua, entered Jerusalem with David, been there when Solomon dedicated the Temple, fought with the Maccabees, with Bar Kochba?  I got one vote, mine, for Here & Now. I explained it, in section 2.1 of chapter 2 of my book, as wanting to be there when we knew how we got where we are, are living at a time and place when a seminal Jewish history course hangs in the balance, and collectively can influence its outcome.

As Charles Krauthammer pithily put it, we live today in a “miraculous age,” that of the rebirth of Jewish homeland sovereignty after eighteen hundred years.  While it’s Jews in Israel who live at the core of this sovereign rebirth, there has been no moment in this miraculous age when close connection between never-more-isolated Jews in Israel and Jews in America has been more critical.

But what can we do?  I point in section 2.2 of chapter 2 “Who We’re Up Against Here and Now – The College Kids and Their Enablers, United Nations, Mainstream Western Media, Europe, ‘As a Jew’ American Jews.”  Silence in the face of their unending “anti-Zionism” (read anti-Jewish) vocal and by some physical assaults is unavailing.  We have to stand up for Israel and us.

In section 2.3 I address “What’s the Answer?” 

“The anti-Israel uproar on college campuses is currently in the spotlight, but it’s the long-term hostility to our Jewish people’s homeland of powerful entities, including those cited above – the UN, the media, the EU, and ‘as a Jew’ American Jews – that has to be recognized and seriously confronted. Unlike a surprising number of rampaging college students, these entities can name the River and the Sea.  We have to answer them with a clear statement of grassroots U.S. Jewish community support for our Jewish homeland of Israel. 

“That answer is an array of fundamental facts and workable solutions detailed in further chapters in this book: debunking toxic terms and malevolent myths, making the case of our people’s continuous homeland presence since ancient times, explaining the injustice to us of a western Palestine ‘two-state solution,’ and the justice to both sides and workability of autonomous areas for Palestinian Arabs in Judea-Samaria in addition to their existing Palestinian homeland in eastern Palestine, Jordan, and their exclusive Palestinian Arab population of another piece of Palestine, Gaza.”

The narrow land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, is geographically indivisible, and historically, legally, equitably and indispensably our Jewish people’s national home.  The more isolated it is among the nations and their international institutions, and the more all of us are tarred by false accusations against it, the more incumbent upon us American Jews it becomes to stand with our people in Israel.  None of us can fight on all these fronts all the time.  Pick one and help rebut the malevolent myths reigning there.