Zionist Organization of America President Morton A. Klein and ZOA Chair Mark Levenson, Esq. released the following statement:
During the December 19 Democratic candidates’ debate, the sole Israel/Jewish question contained two hostile-to-Israel false premises, designed to try to undermine Secretary Pompeo’s recent statement confirming the Jewish people’s international legal right to live in the Jewish homeland in Judea-Samaria. Appallingly, there was no question or discussion during the debate about the recent horrific attacks on/murders of American Jews by African-Americans and Muslims in Jersey City, Brooklyn and elsewhere.
First, the question posed by Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) moderator Yamiche Alcindor falsely claimed that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s statement confirming the legality of Jewish settlements “broke decades-long U.S. precedent.”
In fact, longstanding international law, including U.S. treaty obligations, confirm that the Jewish people have the right to “closely settle” and reestablish the Jewish homeland in Judea-Samaria. Secretary Pompeo’s confirmation of the legality of Jewish homes, communities and towns in the Jewish heartland (a.k.a “settlements”) reversed a recent aberration: former Secretary of State John Kerry’s December 2016 false declaration against Jewish settlements. Kerry’s false statement was made during the “lame duck” session at the end of Obama’s term in office, and was a failed attempt to justify the Obama administration’s passage of anti-Israel UNSCR 2334. Bipartisan House Res. 11 promptly condemned the Obama administration for allowing passage of the anti-Israel UN resolution. (See “ZOA Praises Sec. Pompeo Letter Rebuking the 107 Democrats’ Anti-Settlement Letter as Foolish,” Dec. 18, 2019; and “ZOA’s Morton Klein: 107 Democrats Are Wrong About Judea and Samaria, Dec. 2, 2019.)
Second, PBS moderator Alcindor’s question, “How would you respond to Israeli expansion of settlements? Would you link that to foreign aid to Israel?,” contained the false premise that Jewish settlements are expanding. Unfortunately, there has been a virtual freeze on Jewish homes expanding beyond their current footprint since 1993. And there hasn’t been a single new Jewish settlement built since 1993. Moreover, the concept implicit in the PBS question - that Jewish homes should not be built in any part of the Jewish homeland - is discriminatory and antisemitic, violates international law, and is deeply offensive.
Appallingly, no one challenged the false premises in the PBS question. In fact, no one even answered the question.
Instead, Senator Sanders called Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu “a racist,” and demanded “a level playing field” between Israel and Gaza/Hamas terrorists.
It is outrageous that Sanders falsely called a Jewish Prime Minister, who is dedicated to defending Israel from murderous enemies, “a racist” - while Sanders failed to mention the real antisemitic racists – namely the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the Hamas leadership, which calls for invading Israel to tear out and eat Jews’ hearts and livers.
PA dictator Mahmoud Abbas was the paymaster who financed the brutal murder of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics – and still calls the Munich massacre a “heroic operation,” and still pays terrorists hundreds of millions of dollars each year to murder innocent Jews. Abbas also repeatedly incites violence by, among other things, re-broadcasting his call to spill blood to “protect” the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre from being “defiled” by Jews’ (and presumably Christians’) “filthy feet.” Abbas honors Jew-killers, by among other things, naming schools, soccer teams, and public buildings, after these murderers. (See, e.g., “ZOA: Abbas was Always Anti-Semitic,” May 3, 2018, and source material cited therein including Palestinian Media Watch reports.)
Mayor Pete Buttigieg also failed to answer the question posed to him about the legality of Jewish homes in the Jewish homeland. Instead, Buttigieg launched into a riff that, among other things, in essence condemned President Trump for standing up to the antisemitic despots at the United Nations. Buttigieg bemoaned, “It's not just the mockery at a cocktail party on the sidelines of a conference. It’s the looks on the faces of the leaders at the UN as they looked at the United States president with a mixture of contempt and pity. . . I [Buttigieg] never again want to see the American president looked at that way by the leaders of the world.”
Seriously? Buttigieg will base his American foreign policy on trying to win adoring looks from cocktail-partiers and Iranian and other anti-American and anti-Israel tyrants at the UN?
Buttigieg also falsely accused Trump of interfering in Israeli domestic politics to “act as though that somehow makes him pro-Israel and pro-Jewish.”
Biden falsely stated that Israeli PM Netanyahu “played to all the same fears and all the prejudices that exist in this country and in Israel.” Biden thereby falsely maligned Israel’s leader, and Israeli and American society, in one fell swoop (without a shred of evidence for any of this). Biden added: “Bibi Netanyahu and I know one another well. He knows that I think what he's doing is outrageous.” Again, Biden offered no inkling of what Biden thought was “outrageous.” And like Buttigieg, Biden seems to have no compunction about interfering in Israel’s government and internal matters.
Dangerously, Biden then called for putting “constant” pressure on Israel to move towards establishing a Palestinian State. Biden absurdly stated that a “two-state solution” is the only solution and that no other solution exists.
“Two-state solution” is a euphemism for creating an Iranian-proxy Hamas-Fatah-Hezbollah Palestinian-Arab terror state in Israel’s heartland, on land to which the Jewish people have the binding international legal right. Such a state would endanger Israel’s continued existence. Israel giving away Gaza brought Hamas to power and 25,000 rocket attacks. The same will happen if Israel gives away Judea-Samaria.
It was frightening listening to the misleading PBS question, and Sanders’, Buttigieg’s and Biden’s falsehood-laced anti-Israel pronouncements. And the lack of concern and ignoring of the rise in campus antisemitism and the attacks on and murders of innocent Jews in America and Israel, displayed in this debate, is downright shocking. ZOA calls on PBS to learn the facts and stop asking biased questions, and calls for the candidates involved to re-examine their dangerous Israelophobic positions.
