There is a shameful irony that on the first Holocaust Remembrance Day following the worst one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, US President Joe Biden saw it fitting to call Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pressure him to give sanctuary to the perpetrators and masterminds of that heinous attack and to leave its strongholds in place.
It has also now been confirmed that during Holocaust Remembrance Week, the Biden administration put a hold on shipments of US-made weapons to Israel in an effort to forestall an Israeli attack on Hamas strongholds in Rafah.
Indeed, even after the barbaric slaughter by Hamas of some 1200 people on October 7, and the widespread support it has engendered from over 70% of Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank and in large majorities throughout much of the Arab world, the Biden administration and most Western countries have actually intensified efforts at establishing a 22nd sovereign Arab state in territory from which Israel was, and continues to be, viciously attacked. This is a position also supported by 49 of 51 Democratic members of the US Senate, including six of the seven Jewish senators.
It is confounding that of all the movements around the world seeking religious freedom, autonomy or national rights, the group that attracts, by far, the highest levels of support in the West is one that champions the mass murder of Jews. Over the past seven months, it has become, not only acceptable, but actually quite fashionable on US campuses, to openly identify with, and celebrate the mass murder, rape, decapitations and the burning alive of Jews, to call for “Globalizing the Intifada” and “Palestine from the River to the Sea.”
Those so heavily invested in the Palestinian movement are not similarly moved to act on behalf of the millions of persecuted Tibetans or the Muslim Uighurs in China. We hear almost nothing about the tens of millions of Kurds in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq who have been seeking independence since the end of World War I.
Not even a small portion of the passion regularly expressed in the media and on US campuses for the aspirations of Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank is directed to the plight of millions of Arab refugees in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq.
GIVEN THAT the safety and well-being of millions of people will be effected by the position taken in Washington in the coming months, it behooves the proponents of a Palestinian state who purport to be driven by a sense of justice to be honest with themselves and consider whether they would feel the same way and have the same passion if the tables were turned.
What is the Lady Justice Test, and do proponents of Palestinian statehood pass it?
Can they pass the Lady Justice Test? Lady Justice, a blind-folded woman holding the biblically mandated balanced scales, symbolizes that justice must be meted out without fear or favor, regardless of the identity, power or weakness of the opposing sides. Thus, Lady Justice would require that one’s views on the Arab-Israeli conflict be the same if the Arabs and Jews swapped positions in every key respect.
Imagine world sentiment if the status and history of the Arabs and Jews in the Middle East were reversed.
Instead of the 21 countries that make up the Arab League and the 57 members in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, there were 21 Israeli states and 50 countries with Jewish majorities in an Organization of Judaic Cooperation. In the midst of those 50 Jewish countries, there was one tiny, democratic Arab and Moslem state, first established over 3000 years ago, that renewed its independence in the modern period after a 2000-year exile.
Fifty majority Jewish states have a population 400 times the population of the single Arab Muslim state and territory over 2200 times greater in size.
Five of the Jewish states tried to destroy the reborn Muslim state in its infancy, and, over the past 75 years, various combinations of Jewish states continued to wage war against the one Moslem state. All Muslims were expelled from the Jewish majority countries and their property expropriated.
The one Muslim state has a population of over one million Jews and affords its Jewish citizens full rights, with Jews having complete religious freedom, access to health care and education and representation in parliament and the supreme court.
A large Jewish population also lives in disputed areas in the southwest and in the central and eastern part of the ancient Muslim state. The Jews in these areas began calling themselves Palestinians, though they have no connection to the ancient and long extinct coastal invaders with that name.
The Muslims completely withdrew its army and uprooted all its Muslim citizens from the southwest of its country and gave the “Palestinian” Jews control of their own affairs there, as well as in much of the central and eastern sections of the one Moslem country.
Even as a number of Jewish countries were making peace with the lone Moslem state, the “Palestinian” Jews relentlessly engaged in terror attacks, killing thousands of Muslims and maiming thousands more.
MOST RECENTLY, imagine that, as the one Muslim state in the world was celebrating the culmination of one of its happiest and holiest days of the Muslim calendar, the Palestinian Jews to the Moslem state’s southwest sent thousands of marauding terrorists into Moslem communities and towns, killed 1000 civilians, and inflicted horrific forms of torture that stunned and shook to the core even seasoned medical forensic experts.
Under these circumstances, on which side would we find the Left and the “progressives” on campus, in the media and on Capitol Hill? Would they provide the atrocities with context? Would there be any sentiment in progressive circles that the one Arab Muslim state, having territory that was 1/20th of 1% the size of the Jewish countries across the Middle East and Asia was colonialist?
If the Jews living in or next door to the world’s only Muslim country weaponized their entire civilian infrastructure, embedded their missiles and military command centers in and underneath synagogues, playgrounds and hospitals, and built hundreds of miles of underground tunnels in a diabolic effort to destroy the one Muslim state, would the Western media and political left excoriate the Muslims for not being able to prevent collateral damage when it responded to horrific attacks on its civilians?
If the situation was reversed, would anyone, including – and especially – Jewish US senators, be demanding that the sole Muslim state in the world shrink even further to a border 9 miles wide east to west and relinquish areas that were part of its heartland in order to create a 22nd Israeli state and a 51st Jewish country? Would any Jewish US senator disparage and seek to undermine the legitimacy of a democratically elected Muslim leader that was unwilling to acquiesce to that demand?
Would the international community, including the US government, propagate as dogma that parts of the only Arab and Muslim state be off limits to Muslim Arabs and habitable only by Jews?
The historian Robert Wistrich has described the ancient and uninterrupted manifestation of antisemitism throughout the ages as “The Longest Hatred.” It is a sad and discouraging commentary on the state of morality and liberalism in the West today, that just after one of the worst pogroms in Jewish history, one can feel virtuous by rewarding and cheering on those who champion the massacre, and by applying to Israel, and to Israel only, battlefield standards that would make it impossible for Israel to prevent a repetition.
All those who fail the Lady Justice test should consider whether their supposed good intentions, or the ephemeral approval of hateful, or simply ignorant, people, make up for all the injustice, pain, and suffering caused by their hypocrisy.
The writer is an attorney in Israel and New York.