So, VP Biden spoke to J-Street the other day and Jonathan Tobin wrote it up for Commentary:
According to Biden, the problem in the region is that “there is no will for peace” among Israelis or Palestinians. His argument was that both the Netanyahu government and the Palestinian Authority were equally responsible for the lack of progress. Their actions, he said, meant, “the trust that is necessary for peace is fractured on both sides.”There are two important things to consider here.
Feeding the liberal J Street audience what they wanted to hear, Biden excoriated settlements in the West Bank as “counterproductive” and a threat to Israel’s continuance as both a Jewish and democratic state.
The first is the lie that the Jews of Israel have no will for peace.
This is among the most mendacious notions out there. Of course, the Jews want peace! There is nobody in the region that has greater reason to see peace than the Jewish people of Israel. The problem here is not that Jews are the aggressors, but that the great Arab-Muslim majority ruled over us in the region for thirteen hundred years, until the fall of the Ottomans and the rise of Jewish nationalism in the early part of the twentieth-century, and - in part for religious reasons - the Arabs developed a taste for domination.
We are not the guilty party in this conflict.
We are not the imperialist aggressors.
All the Jews want is to be left the hell alone to litigate against one another and create various helpful medical and technological doo-dads.
The second is the racist focus on the notion that Jews should only be allowed to live in certain places.
How did we ever allow things to get to the point where so many of us honestly believe that allegedly well-meaning non-Jews, like Biden, have every right to tell us where we should be allowed to live on the very land that we come from?
Where is Jewish self-respect?
It is not Jews living in Judea that is "counterproductive," but Biden and his administration which are entirely so.
{Good Pesach.}
