Where Is American Jewry?
By: Elyakim Haetzni
The Jewish Press
Excerpts from this article
Reference: An Urgent Public Message from Prof. Paul Eidelberg (a foregoing post here)

Complaints we have in Israel against American Jews are not directed at the various George Soroses or Noam Chomskys, or at those Jews uninterested in the fate of the Jews in the Jewish state. We address our cries to those for whom Eretz Yisrael still holds a place in their hearts – and to their organizations and institutions. We ask them the following: Where are you in our hour of need? Don’t you know that if we sink, the ground beneath your own feet will quake? Have you not yet learned that the very fact that the Jews have their own country has buttressed your status in the Diaspora?

Until this very day you regret your silence during the Holocaust, which derived from your great admiration for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and from the fear of being accused of dual loyalties. . . . today your conscience is called upon once more to make a similar decision – albeit one much simpler, for today’s America is not like the anti-Semitic America of that time.

Don’t you understand the danger looming over Israel? The entire world, led by the United States, is hunting Israel down to wrest from it Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, the Land of the Bible – its entire raison d’etre as a Jewish state.

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Take note that only the center of the country still enjoys calm. The only reason for that is that the army controls Judea and Samaria, and that is because there are hundreds of Jewish towns there (“the settlements,” in the language of our enemies). And now, the United States is pressuring your Jewish brethren in Israel to dispense with even that defense. President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have sworn to establish a Palestinian terror state right next to Tel Aviv, Netanya, Hadera and Haifa before year’s end – and toward that end, expel 300,000 of our Jewish brothers and sisters.

And faced with all this, you remain silent? Worse, most of your organizations support this anti-Jewish, pro-Arab policy! Today, missiles are flying from the ruins of Gush Katif and landing in the Negev. On the day that missiles are being launched from the ruins of the Jewish towns in Samaria, please don’t say, “We didn’t see. We didn’t hear. We didn’t know.”

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You knew very well! The Annapolis Conference, in which a blind, stumbling, defeatist Israeli government open to American pressure knowingly consented to commit national suicide, occurred in your country. Rice, whose total identification with Palestinian interests is patently obvious, is applauded by your audiences. And you call President Bush, the man with the “vision” of a Palestinian state that will endanger every city and village in Israel, “the greatest friend Israel ever had in the White House.”

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Other voices in the Republican camp, namely Vice President Dick Cheney, senators and congressmen, have not enjoyed support from most of American Jewry . . . .

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For Jews faithful to their patrimony, some Christian churches are more open today than many Jewish temples. Their organizations and media are more open to nationalistic Jews than are the mainstream Jewish establishment. They visit Hebron, Shiloh and Beit El – places that many Jewish leaders stay away from.

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. . . money is not the critical factor. It is political pressure capable of meeting the enormous Arab pressure. Regarding your historic omission during the Holocaust, when you failed to exercise your power as Queen Esther did in her time (ignoring the risk to her own life), you have tried to atone with money. Yet all the money in the world cannot bring back to life a single Jewish child. Even today, it is not money that can save us, but rather the political power that you are afraid to exercise.

I conclude with two requests: First, that those Jews who support the Palestinian line should at least not emphasize their Jewishness . . . . Second, that the not insignificant number of Jews who, like Mordechai in the Scroll of Esther, do not bow down before the president of the United States when he sets out to replace the vision of the prophets with the “vision” of Palestine, should organize themselves and establish an organization paralleling the Jewish protest organizations that in Israel face off with the government and block with their bodies the slippery slide down the Palestinian slope.

Today, like the air we breathe, we need an organized Jewish political force in the United States that, together with our non-Jewish friends in America and the Jewish nationalist camp in Israel, can breach the siege that is closing us off.

Attorney Elyakim Haetzni, among Hebron’s original settlers, is a prominent publicist for Eretz Yisrael causes.