Secretary Kristi Noem and the Department of Homeland Security announced $94 million in federal grants to over 500 Jewish-based organizations across the United States.
I recently sat down with Rabbi Sanford Akselrad from Congregation Ner Tamid, who told me the temple spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on security.
"The fight against hate against the Jews would morph yet again, um, so when someone says that they are, they, they love Jews but they, but they hate Israel and you get a little deeper, what do they mean by that… and usually when they go into the territory not of being critical of Israel which is fair game. But they say Israel has no right to exist at all now… we get into the area of antisemitism," Akselrad said.
More grants are expected in the coming months.
Israelis and Palestinians have lived in the area for centuries and centuries. They’re ethnically the same, brothers and sisters. They differ by culture and the old problem (familiarity breeds contempt). I have maintained all along that both have a right to exist and to self-determination.
But there are people here that now deny these rights to Israelis simply because Israel has a lot of military and political power right now. It’s like for them it’s not enough for Palestine to be free, they must also see Israel destroyed. And in the process they overlook the atrocities committed by Hamas (not to mention what the PLO did in Jordan decades ago).
Again, where was the lie?
Not according to the state of Israel
The lie was that only Palestinians have lived there for thousands of years.
Correction: the government of Israel, with a ruling party (Likud, led by Bibi) which has 32/120 seats in the Knesset. That’s less than 27% of the seats. This is what you get with proportional representation and coalition government.
Israel (the state) has always given special rights to ethnic Jews. It was founded *as an explicitly Jewish state. Jews have always been given a unique right to freely immigrate and gain citizenship, while limiting Palestinian’s right to even return to their homes in Israel after having to flee. It isn’t just about the current government - Israel has always been predicated on an ethno-religious immigration campaign. No other nation on the planet is as singularly-focused on the ethnic makeup of its population, to the point that they have an actual program to retrieve the reproductive material of soldiers who die in combat. Zionists will waste no time calling you antisemitic if you were to suggest that Israel should provide equal rights regardless of ethnic or religious identity, or suggest that Palestinians and Jews might live together on their shared ancestral land. It’s that idea that Palestinians are so violent that they’d just “destroy all the Jews” if they were to ever be given equal status that is the wildly bigoted and racist one.
This isn’t some transient political movement unique to Netanyahu’s government, it’s been a principle feature of its mission since it’s founding.