Zionism on the Upper East Side
We watch in horror from afar as the Zionist terror state continues its genocide against the people of Gaza and escalates its slower-motion, lower-technology genocide against the 3 million Palestinians who reside in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, otherwise known as the Occupied Territories — illegally occupied, of course.
As a few Israeli commentators have pointed out — those few who guard their integrity— the operative principle here is the limitless impunity the Western powers have long granted “the Jewish state.”
This is the outcome, they say, when a people given to a culture of vengeance are told they will never suffer consequences however barbaric their conduct toward others, however many laws they break, however many their assassinations, however many their torture victims, however many exploding telephones they plant among civilian populations, etc.
Maybe we need no reminders, maybe we do, that this presumption of impunity is not bound by sovereign borders and is not limited to the cowardly, condemnable savagery of apartheid Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. But we had one last week, and it is well we consider it carefully.
Zohran Mamdani, the principled social democrat who is New York’s mayor-elect, is now under attack from Zionist Americans who insist Zionist Americans are above the law — American law and international law. You may look well on Mamdani and you may not, but as he is besieged by these objectionable people, so are we all.
This story begins on Wednesday, Nov. 19, at Park East Synagogue, a grand edifice that sits on East 67th Street between Third and Lexington Avenues in the Lenox Hill section of Manhattan.
Park East has been serving Modern Orthodox Jews since 1890. Its congregation, to be noted, is comprised of the great and good of the Upper East Side. These are observant but assimilated Jews, thoroughly plugged into, let’s say, secular public space.
Except.
Two Wednesdays back Park East hosted an organization dedicated to encouraging Jews to “make Aliyah,” the Hebrew term for emigrating to “the Promised Land.” O.K., you cannot find anything legally wrong in this, although it is unambiguously a moral wrong in that it expresses support for a genocidal state.
But let us set aside the moral question for now. The organization Park East sponsored, Nefesh B’Nefesh, also assists American Jews who wish to emigrate to Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. This is a legal matter and as such not inconsequential.
American Settlers
Statistics on the settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are hard to nail down (and I can easily imagine why). The Times of Israel reported eight years ago that some 60,000 Americans were among the Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
That was roughly 15 percent of the settler population then — not counting the considerable number residing in East Jerusalem. We have no precise figures now, but these populations — settlers and Americans among the settlers — are both higher.
As has been well-reported, and well-recorded in several documentaries, the Americans among the West Bank settlers are frequently the most violent in their incessant attacks on Palestinians. They have also been at times the most readily inclined to murder.
There is the infamous case of Baruch Goldstein, a freakshow Zionist from Brooklyn who killed 29 Palestinians when he attacked the Ibrahimi Mosque (tomb of Abraham and other patriarchs) in Hebron in 1994. Goldstein was not singular: He was and remains exemplary — and a hero among some Zionists. National Security Minister Ben Givr had a picture of Goldstein on his living room wall until 2020.
I cannot name the precise statutes applicable here, but they must be several. Open and shut, just the faces, Ma’am, Nefesh B’Nefesh is an accomplice to the settler movement.
Most immediately significant in the Park East case, Nefesh B’Nefesh — this translates as “soul to soul,” and who knows what that is all about — is directly implicated in the settlers’ breach of international law given that all the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal according to said law.
There was no claiming surprise that blustery Nov. 19th when a group of roughly 200 vociferous demonstrators gathered in front of Park East to protest the promotional seminar Nefesh B’Nefesh was running that day.
“Death to the IDF” was among the tamer of various chants; others encouraged violence against settlers. “It is our duty,” one leader of the demonstration said measuredly to those assembled, “to make them think twice before holding these events.”
Inside the Park East building, people indirectly but unmistakably promoting violence against Palestinians, land theft and all the rest. And on East 67th Street, righteous indignation, anger in behalf of a persecuted people, some violent rhetoric, but no violence.
It was obvious the mayor-elect would have to intervene. The event itself warranted this, and various Zionist constituencies, as well-reported before and since Mamdani’s election, have been attacking him as a radical jihadist, an anti–Semite and who knows what else, so attempting to poison his relations with New York’s Jewish community.
Here is the ever-poised Mamdani’s day-after statement, his first on the incident:
“The mayor-elect has discouraged the use of language used at last night’s protest and will continue to do so. He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
A few days later, storms of protest from Zionist quarters having instantly erupted, Mamdani sent this statement to The New York Times:
“We will protect New Yorkers’ First Amendment rights while making clear that nothing can justify language calling for ‘death to’ anyone. It is unacceptable, full stop.”
I find these statements a little in the way of Solomon in their discernment, in Mamdani’s determination not to tilt his hand and to articulate the core truth of the matter:
The more extreme language out on East 67th Street was wrong so far as it intimidated synagogue goers, but the principle of free speech is nonetheless to be honored; those encouraging breaches of international law are wrong, and a synagogue should not be used to promote illegalities.
‘A Hateful Mob’
Maybe what has come back at Mamdani in the course of all this was predictable, more-of-the-same babble. “Mob” was the de rigueur term among those responding to the mayor-elect’s response.
The demonstrators were “a hateful mob of anti–Israel protesters,” the New York Post reported, and it got worse from there. Mamdani sided with “an anti–Semitic mob,” eJP, or eJewishphilanthropy.com, declared. “Last week,” this outfit continued, “Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani failed the first test of his promise to protect all New Yorkers.”
And from William Daroff, the chief exec of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations: “We are still judging him, and I’d say that at the moment he’s got a failing grade.”
They sitteth in judgment, you see.
O.K., we have heard all this before in one or another context, so has Mamdani. He is surely in for more of same once he assumes office Jan. 1. But we ought not miss the very much larger matters raised by the Park East incident.
There is the First Amendment question, as Mamdani correctly noted, and there are the legal questions as pencil-sketched above. These are related at the not-too-distant horizon.
People speaking for Nefesh B’Nefesh now deny they promote emigration to West Bank settlements — which, as the group’s website attests, is simply not true. It advertises Gush Etzion, an expanding sprawl of 22–and-counting settlements south of Jerusalem, Ma`ale Adumim, whose location makes it key to the Israelis final takeover of the West Bank, and various others.
“Teaching about Aliyah and Zionism belongs in that space”: This is the aforementioned William Daroff. And from eJP again: “Mamdani condemned the synagogue’s choice of programming.”
Choice of programming.
You see what is going on here. Park East and Nefesh B’Nefesh are encouraging Americans to breach international law. And absolutely to a one, those defending the synagogue and the event-organizer do so by pretending this is not what is most pithily at issue.
“We are deeply concerned by, and firmly condemn, the violent rhetoric and aggressive behavior that took place outside of the Park East Synagogue,” Nefesh B’Nefesh now declares on its website. Violent rhetoric and aggressive behavior on East 67th Street but not in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem.
To go straight to the point, this is another assertion of Zionist impunity. And we should understand what has lately transpired in New York as a very, very direct extension of the impunity that encourages and also protects the Israeli terror machine in Gaza and the West Bank. Impunity: It is a blight under which Palestinians suffer, and none of us is immune to it.
To put this another way, we witness an especially insidious case of chutzpah, the dangers of which I have considered elsewhere. You have your laws, the world has its, and we will ignore them before your eyes (and ostracize you as an anti–Semite if you object). This, in a sentence, is what Zionists now insist we must accept.
I do not know what I would have chanted were I among the 200 outside Park East Synagogue the evening of Nov. 19.
I know what I would have wanted to hear from those inside: I would have wanted every right-thinking congregant at Park East to emerge denouncing Zionism as a blight on the splendor of Judaism’s authentic traditions — this and loud denunciation of all that Israel’s impunity licenses it to do more or less everywhere.