We shall not be moved
Jews, Israel’s indigenous people, aren’t going anywhere
What kind of a liberation movement purposely, with malice aforethought, murders a 9-month-old infant, a 4-year-old toddler and their terrorized mother?
What kind of world praises Hamas’ atrocities?
How “civilized” can people in the civilized West be if, in response to the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, they continue to support the rape, torture, murder and kidnapping of civilians from southern Israel?
Or, just hours after Hamas announced that it would be returning the corpses of the Bibas children and their mother, respond by violently attacking Orthodox Jews in Borough Park, the heavily Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn in which I grew up?
No matter what our individual views may be, and whether or not we are religious, Jews are indigenous to the Holy Land. We were there long before anyone else ever visited or occupied us.
There were always Jews there. Now, we are a sovereign nation in the Holy Land once again.
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Throughout many exiles, our culture, prayers, rituals, ethics and memories were centered upon, or radiated out from, the Holy Land. The language of our prayers and holy books was first Aramaic, then Hebrew; these languages have existed and been utilized for nearly 6,000 years.
However, if you search online for “the indigenous nature of Jews,” you will read this: “The Jewish people have a very ancient history in the land known both as Palestine and the Land of Israel.”
Known as Palestine? By whom? By those who wish to exterminate the Jewish presence in Israel, just as they have done in every Arab and Muslim country? By AI? Wikipedia? By left-wing billionaires in the West who are joined by the deep pocketed elite of Iran and Qatar?
What can I say that hasn’t already been said many times over? I am weary of telling the truth only to be met with the most ferocious lies.
I sent a fact-based study to a radical feminist in Australia about how Israel has not starved or genocidally exterminated civilians in Gaza, and she responded with a piece of Hamas propaganda to refute “my” truth.
Since Oct. 7, a close friend of mine in London — a woman who is not Jewish but has stood for both the truth and the Jews — has been suffering the loss of colleagues; Arab, Muslim and Southeast Asian women have turned on her and cut her off.
Me? I’m long used to this. These cowards and conformists will never break my spirit. However, I have not yet solved the challenge of how to deprogram those suffering from mass psychosis, hysterical paranoia or a belief in inverted truths.
All I can write, again and again, is this: Whenever Hamas and its supporters accuse Israel of some crime, it must be taken as Hamas’ own confession. The genocidal maniacs are the Islamist terrorists, not the Israel Defense Forces. The practicing of gender and religious apartheid is not characteristic of Israelis, but it does describe Arab and Muslim culture, both historically and in our times.
Many of us have said this over and over. Now, more people in the West are beginning to understand it as well.
The Orthodox Jews in Borough Park fought back. The Israel Defense Forces fights back. We wordsmiths are fighting back.
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None of the pogroms we’re seeing against the Jews are spontaneous. Most are well-funded and well-organized uprisings meant to further terrorize grieving and vulnerable Jewish communities. The vicious verbal attacks, tearing down of hostage posters, smirks and curses of those who do so, jeering and menacing mobs, such as the masked and armed Hamas warriors who mocked and mobbed the three skeletal Israelis as they were being returned to Israel, and the encampments on college campuses — all are meant to traumatize and retraumatize our people in the hope that we will give up, quit, resign and disappear. Not just from the Holy Land but from life itself.
This has never happened before, and it will not happen now.
Phyllis Chesler is an emerita professor of psychology and women’s studies at CUNY.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
