Jews unite against Trump's immigration restrictions.https://t.co/i1A8GuHeXB…ratic-principles/
— Jewish Journal (@JewishJournal) May 25, 2017
David Suissa writes for the Jewish Journal:
Professor Makdisi based many of his arguments on universal values such as fairness, equality, justice, and so on. Focusing on those values helped him finesse the Achilles Heel of the BDS movement– the fact that they don’t recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Promoting the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees to Israel, for example, means the effective end of the Jewish state, what a panelist on the Pearl side called “national suicide.”
Makdisi took that word — suicide — and ran with it, almost ridiculing it as an example of needless hysterics from the Zionist side. You could see where he was going. What kind of just society would treat the arrival of Palestinians as a national suicide? Sure, there may be a great number of Palestinians who want to return to Israel, but what’s wrong with Arabs and Jews living side by side, in full equality, in the same state and under the same government?
Then, he got carried away and blurted out these words:
“What’s wrong with Jews being a minority?”
There was a gasp among some pro-Israel members of the audience. Pearl himself made a grimace, and commented that minorities are not treated very well in the Middle East.
I have a feeling Makdisi regretted his words as soon as he said them.
Why? Because he’s no fool. He’s a knowledgeable professor, and he surely knows what’s wrong with Jews being a minority in a country of the Middle East.
He knows that, for centuries, Jews in Arab and Muslim countries were treated as second-class citizens, or Dhimmis. He knows that many of those Jews were persecuted and expelled after the birth of Israel in 1948.
He knows that there are 50 Muslim countries in the world, but only one Jewish state.
He knows that in many of those 50 countries, non-Muslim minorities are routinely persecuted and oppressed.
He knows that the Arab minority in Israel has more rights, freedom, legal protections and economic opportunities than Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East.
He knows all of that.
So, when he said, so innocently, “What’s wrong with Jews being a minority?” he probably forgot who was in the audience. Maybe he thought he was talking to a Students for Justice in Palestine crowd, for whom a Jewish minority in the Jewish state would be like manna from heaven.
But he wasn’t. There were some proud Zionists in the audience, and I was one of them.
I’m a Jew who was born in an Arab country, where my ancestors were a minority for centuries. The stories I heard were not of human rights and equality. They were stories about surviving by behaving — by keeping our heads down and our mouths shut. My grandparents in Morocco never got to fight for their rights. They couldn’t.
That’s why for 1900 years Jews from all over the world dreamed and yearned to return home to Zion and Jerusalem. That’s why the Zionist movement fought so hard for the rebirth of the Jewish state. Because the Jewish experience of being a vulnerable minority in a hostile land is certainly not one we want to relive.
For Makdisi to suggest that it’s OK for Jews to become dhimmis again, well, if you ask me, that’s not very moral.
It sucks being a minority. I don’t enjoy that whites are a minority in Southern California. I don’t like it that whites will be a minority of the population by around 2042.
