31 Days to Go – Will You Demonstrate?

By Sherwin Pomerantz

The clock is ticking and there are now 31 days before the opening of the UN General Assembly in New York and the vote a day or two after that on Palestinian statehood.

One of my readers has raised the question of whether or not there are demonstrations planned for New York during the period of the General Assembly against the drive for statehood by the Palestinian Arab leadership? A search of the web turned up nothing although I hope that will not really be the case as the date draws closer.

Do you remember December 6, 1987? That was the Sunday when over 250,000 people descended on Washington from all parts of the United States to demonstrate on behalf of Soviet Jewry. It was, at the time, the largest outpouring of support for that movement and was timed to occur a day before Gorbachev and Reagan were scheduled to meet in the nation’s capital. The organizers never expected that more than 150,000 people would participate in the middle of winter, yet representatives of over 300 community groups in the US braved the cold and made their voices known, insuring that the issue of human rights in the Soviet Union would be placed on Reagan’s “front burner.”

The members of the American community who care about values and the respect for the right of those of us living here to live fruitful lives in the national homeland of the Jewish people need to do as much this year as well.

Many of you know that fully 20% of the US Congress will have visited Israel this month. I won’t deal here with the propriety of legislators leaving their desks when the country is in so much economic turmoil, as others smarter than me have spoken about this. But they are here nonetheless and last week, at a meeting in Ramallah with Mahmoud Abbas he shared with the visiting legislators his vision of a Palestinian state, and it was not pretty.

His main point was that if he succeeds in creating an independent Palestinian state it will have no Jewish settlements. In his zeal to achieve ethnic cleansing of Jews presently living in Judea and Samaria, he is speaking about the eviction of over 500,000 Jews from everywhere over the “green line” including Jerusalem neighborhoods such as Ramot, Gilo, Ramat Shlomo and, of course, the large settlement blocs of Gush Etzion, Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel. After that he added that if multinational forces were to enforce a future peace, those forces could also not contain any Israelis, whether they lived in Israel or abroad (a bit of moderation over his earlier statement that they could not contain any Jews).

So the message is clear. The simple fact that Jews might live in a Palestinian state is a humiliating thing for the Palestinians. Of course, if the shoe were on the other foot and we said that after a peace treaty no Arabs would be allowed to live in Israel the world would become one ball of fire with anti-Israel demonstrations everywhere. We dare not blind ourselves to the possibility that the real desire of the Palestinian Arab leadership is not to make peace with Israel but to see to our ultimate expulsion from this part of the world.

While I do not believe, and certainly hope, that this will not happen vigilance is critical. So thinking Americans, Jews and non-Jews, should be on the barricades in New York in mid-September to make it clear to the UN and the world that the intransigence of the Palestinian Arab leadership in not being willing to even come to the negotiating table, will not be rewarded by a declaration of statehood one of whose aims is to make the resultant country Judenrein!!
There must be a demonstration that will make Washington in December 1987 look like amateur night.

Edmund Burke was right when he said “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” We need to internalize that lesson.