This very brief video clip of Chuck Schumer at the 2018 AIPAC conference s making the rounds on social media. There is so much here to unpack.
1. Schumer has no idea what the “view of Palestinians” is, since, to begin with, Palestinians hold a very wide range of views, like any other group of people. More than that, Schumer is simply ignorant of the Palestinian people, a group he routinely dehumanizes.
2. Schumer contends the “Torah says Israel is our (Jews’) land.” Even if we accepted that the Torah is a land deed (which it most certainly is not), the Torah is also quite clear that God’s promise of the land to Abraham was contingent on the behavior of the Israelites.
Moreover, millennia of Jewish tradition held this to be true and that the condition of Diaspora for the Jewish people was a divine decision that could only be ended by another divine decision, not by human agency. The only reason this idea was abandoned by many (very far from all) observant Jews was the rise of SECULAR nationalism in the form of Zionism, which some Jewish religious leaders allowed to twist long-held Jewish traditions.
3. Schumer says “Palestinians don’t believe in the Torah.” Actually, virtually all religious Palestinians are either Christian or Muslim, albeit of many different denominations. All of them hold the Torah holy, as a precursor to the Gospels and the Quran.
4. In the end, none of this matters. The United States has no business adjudicating religious questions in Palestine-Israel or anywhere else. It violates the spirit of the 1st Amendment. More than this, it is a thoroughly illegitimate basis for policy, especially when that policy affects the basic human rights of millions of people on all sides.
If you want to know why the United States is arguably the single biggest obstacle to justice, end of conflict, and a better future in the Middle East, look no further than Chuck Schumer.
And if you want to know why the Jewish people have been led stray it is because we have “leaders” like Chuck Schumer who are ignorant of Jewish history, tradition, and literature.