FEBRUARY 10 • 2022 | 7
expulsions, antisemitic decrees
and riots. Prior to 1948, about
800,000 Jews lived in Arab
lands. Those communities
have vanished, with a mere
3,000 remaining in Morocco
and Tunisia combined, fewer
than 100 in Israel’s neighbors
Egypt, Lebanon and Syria,
and others such as Libya and
Jordan with not a single Jewish
resident. Lest we frame this as
simply an historical policy, the
Palestinian Authority today
also insists that any land creat-
ed as an official state have no
Jewish residents.
As progressive Jews, this
assumption that Palestinian
territory should be cleared of
any Jewish population should
alarm us. In any other contest-
ed area, a bedrock principle
of our approach to human
rights is that people born in a
region should not be displaced.
Somehow, however, when it
comes to the disputed areas
Israel controls, Jewish children
born in a town to parents and
even grandparents who have
lived there for over half a cen-
tury are not deemed residents
who have a stake in whatever
compromise is reached. If we
in the liberal community are
critical of bad actors in the
settler community, we ought to
find equal fault in the repres-
sive notion that a Palestinian
state has the right to evict
generations of residents born
in their very own towns and
villages based on their religion.
That ongoing push to con-
tinue clearing land of Jews,
however, is the very definition
of apartheid, and even beyond,
of ethnic cleansing. For the
Arab world, who completely
displaced their 800,000 strong
Jewish community and still
insist they have the right to
remove all Jewish residents
from any future state, to
level the charge of apartheid
at Israel, home to nearly 2
million non-Jewish Arabs, is
beyond hypocritical.
There is a straight line
running from our inability to
immediately identify a radical
gunman holding Jewish wor-
shippers hostage as antisemitic,
to turning a blind eye to phys-
ical attacks on Orthodox Jews,
to dismissing decades of Arab
wars and terrorism against the
Jewish State, to actually label-
ling Israel — a country with a
non-white majority — as an
oppressive white institution.
In this emerging moral
norm, antisemitism is only
real if it comes from white
supremacists while Israeli Jews
of color defending themselves
from wars of extermination
can be labeled as apartheid.
As Purim approaches, all of
us can draw inspiration from
Esther and Mordechai who
pushed back at the highest lev-
els to defend the Jewish nation
from upside down lies and
oppression. Distorting facts
and history to single out the
one Jewish state as illegitimate
or apartheid is as vile as it is
false. We, who are allies to so
many in the progressive camp,
should demand some allyship
in return — or at the very least
hold Amnesty International
and other key organizations
accountable when they
become the latest purveyors of
this oldest hatred.
Cantor Michael Smolash sits in the
Stephen Gottlieb z”l Cantorial Chair
at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield,
where he has served since 2004.
His essay, “Left in Silence”, appears
in the book “Fault Lines — Exploring
the complicated place of Progressive
American Jewish Zionism” edited
by Rabbi Menachem Creditor and
Amanda Berman.
APARTHEID from page 5
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