Nothing riles New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman more than an Israeli government with the audacity to disregard his opinions and demands. His laceration of the Jewish state stretches as far back as his undergraduate years at Brandeis University. There, he was a member of Breira, a left-wing Jewish advocacy group that favored a two-state solution along the pre-1967 lines, thereby removing biblical Judea and Samaria (previously Jordan's "west bank") from Israeli control. Friedman has been an unrelenting critic of Israel ever since.

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In a March 8 diatribe, Friedman fancifully warned that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pursuing a "judicial putsch to crush the independence" of Israel's judiciary. He urged American Jews "to choose sides on Israel," but not any side – only Friedman's.

"Every rabbi and every Jewish leader in America," he wrote, must speak out to affirm his fury. Friedman's preferred Jewish leader seems to be Los Angeles Rabbi Sharon Brous, who recently delivered a sermon titled "The Tears of Zion," urging her congregation to challenge Netanyahu's "illiberal, ultranationalist regime." Only Netanyahu, it seems, is worthy of rabbinical laceration.

Given Friedman's rants, Brous's was mild criticism. In what he no doubt viewed as his nastiest insult, Friedman not only blamed Netanyahu for embracing "more and more ultranationalist and ultrareligious parties," but also claimed that the prime minister "has come to embrace the Trumpist playbook," whatever that means.

Friedman ignores the fact that, for Israel, former President Donald Trump was the most supportive American president since Harry Truman recognized the fledgling Jewish state back in 1948. Trump acknowledged Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and relocated the American embassy to Jerusalem in 2017, affirming it as Israel's capital. Would that Friedman's preferred presidents, whoever they may be, had done as much for Israel.

In Friedman's indictment, Netanyahu is guilty of "radicalizing his base, attacking Israel's legal, media and academic institutions" and "inciting his loyalists against centrist and left-wing Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs."

Nor was that all. Netanyahu's governments wrote Friedman, have "sought every way possible to avoid the peace process with the Palestinians." As it happens, it is the Palestinians who have rejected every opportunity for negotiations with Israel, as well as every Israeli offer of statehood and peace.

Friedman is also enraged that Netanyahu's (unidentified) "team" has also "dismissed liberal American Jews" (like Friedman), choosing instead "to focus their energies on building support for Israel with Republicans and their evangelical base." To Friedman, this is a shanda – a disgrace. He appears unaware of the fact that Israeli prime ministers are not obligated to take his advice.

"Alas," Friedman laments, "most American Jewish organizations and lay leaders" – with the exception of "the powerful right-leaning Jewish lobbying organization" AIPAC – "are not built for this kind of existential fight inside Israel." Instead, they do "whatever Netanyahu tells them." Friedman prefers the opinion of a trio of Israeli writers who warned in The Times of Israel of "a political leadership that is undermining our society's cohesion and its democratic ethos."

To be sure, Friedman has hardly been the only Times journalist to lacerate Israel. Ever since the birth of Jewish statehood, a bevy of Jerusalem bureau chiefs and columnists – many of whom, like him, were Jewish – have joined the chorus of criticism. Indeed, at times it seemed as if that was an actual job requirement.

Friedman is currently ideologically partnered with current Times Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley, who seems incapable of writing an article without reference to Israeli "occupied" territory – that is, biblical Judea and Samaria. Times Jerusalem reporter Isabel Kershner has also adopted this misnomer.

None of them have attempted to explain why Benjamin Netanyahu, their favorite Israeli villain, is the longest-serving prime minister in Israel's history. Perhaps it is they, not Netanyahu, who deserve reproach for their unremitting hostility.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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On June 7, 1967, during Israel's Six-Day War, Israeli Defense Forces Commander Mordechai Gur led the breakthrough in Jordanian defenses in Jerusalem and excitedly proclaimed: "The Temple Mount is in our hands." It marked the first time that the Jewish people controlled Judaism's holiest site in more than 2,000 years. Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren blew his shofar in celebration and recited the Shehecheyanu prayer of thanksgiving. IDF Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin sensed that he was "standing at the very heart of Jewish history."

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But the euphoria was short-lived. The current issue of Commentary features an illuminating (and sorrowful) article by Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik titled "Moshe Dayan's Tragic Blunder." He is referring to Israeli Defense Minister Dayan's decision, at the moment of Israel's triumphant victory, to prohibit Jews from praying on the Temple Mount, identified by Rabbi Soloveichik as "the most important site in Jewish history."

Dayan, of course, knew this. Arriving at the Western Wall to greet triumphant Israeli soldiers, he proclaimed: "We have returned to our holiest site so as never to part with it again." He added: "We did not come to conquer the holy sites of others or to restrict their religious rights." Only the rights of Jews would be restricted – by Dayan himself.

At Dayan's command, an Israeli flag raised over the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount to celebrate the victory was removed. Ten days later, meeting with Arab religious leaders at Al-Aqsa Mosque, he assured them that Muslims would decide who could enter and pray there. Their decision was predictable: Jews were prohibited. The Western Wall below the mount was as close as Jews could get to the site of their ancient temples. In a stunning irony, they were forbidden by an Israeli military commander to pray at the holiest Jewish site.

Dayan's decision, according to Erik Freas, author of Nationalism and the Al-Haram Al-Sharif/Temple Mount, reflected "an essentially secular understanding of Jewish identity." Indeed, Dayan had vacillated over whether the Temple Mount should even be in Israeli hands, asking sardonically: "What do I need all this Vatican for?"

Despite Gur's assurance that the Temple Mount was "in our hands," it was not. The Israeli government, fearful that it would provoke heightened conflict with Arab states, agreed. The Kingdom of Jordan, not the State of Israel, would control the most sacred Jewish site. Ironically, Israeli chief rabbis expressed pleasure that the mount was under Jewish control but warned Jews not to go there. Israel would retain the Mount, but Muslims would rule over it.

A similar Israeli surrender occurred in Hebron, where another stunning victory in the Six-Day War returned the most ancient holy city and sites to the Jewish people. For millennia, the Cave of the Patriarchs had been closed to Jews by Muslim rulers.

But Dayan, once again, intervened. He countermanded Goren's attempts to reclaim the site for Israel and Judaism. To placate Arab Muslims, he ordered the Israeli flag lowered and a Torah scroll removed. Visiting hours for Jews were restricted; no Jewish worship was allowed on Fridays, Islam's Shabbat. When Goren gave permission for wedding ceremonies to be held inside the Cave of the Patriarchs, Dayan overruled him. It was, Dayan subsequently wrote, "up to us to show broad tolerance." No such tolerance was extended to religious Jews.

Dayan's decision to prohibit Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, writes Rabbi Soloveichik, "was a terrible mistake, the worst in Israel's history." It "was founded on total disregard for what the Temple Mount meant to religious Jews."

Two years ago, an Israeli rabbi was removed from the Temple Mount for praying there – silently – during his Yom Kippur visit. But his appeal was upheld by a judge, who noted that "his prayer was quiet, whispered." Only Muslims, it seems, can pray loudly at the holiest Jewish site.

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The current political turmoil in Israel, which seems to intensify daily, is not new to Jewish history in the Promised Land. An Israeli friend reminded me of a previous example of "brothers at war" that erupted one month after the birth of the State of Israel in 1948.

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The arrival of the Altalena, a ship dispatched from France by the right-wing Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, was filled with desperately needed weapons and munitions. On board were more than 900 fighters prepared to defend the newborn Jewish state with their lives if necessary.

But its arrival triggered a violent internecine conflict. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, claiming that the Altalena posed a menacing challenge to the legitimacy of the Israeli government – and to his authority – ordered the newborn IDF to destroy it.

The ensuing battle on the beaches of Kfar Vitkin and Tel Aviv brought Israel to the brink of civil war. Sixteen Irgun fighters and three IDF soldiers died during the fighting and the ship, with its desperately needed weapons, was destroyed. Ben-Gurion and his defenders insisted that force was justified to save the fragile new nation from self-destruction.

The Altalena tragedy was long ago and its memory has faded. But Israel now confronts an ominously deepening conflict between its newly elected right-wing government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his political opponents on the Left. According to an Associated Press report, his right-wing governing coalition has "prompted an unprecedented uproar from Israeli society."

And not only among Israelis. New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Patrick Kingsley described the newly elected government as riding "a wave of far-Right agenda items that would weaken the judiciary, entrench Israeli control of the West Bank … and bifurcate the military chain of command to give some far-right ministers greater control over matters related to the occupation." For the Times, the "occupation" invariably refers to the return of Jews to biblical Judea and Samaria following the Six-Day War.

Kingsley cited the "centerpiece" of Netanyahu's program as "a detailed plan for a sweeping judicial overhaul that includes reducing the Supreme Court's influence over parliament and strengthening the government's role in the appointment of judges." Netanyahu's agenda "threatens Israel's democratic institutions" and "sounds the death rattle for long-ailing hopes for a Palestinian state."

There will also be "a more combative stance toward the Palestinians" by reducing funding to the Palestinian Authority. And Itamar Ben-Gvir, the new national security minister "has angered Palestinians and many Arab countries by touring a sensitive religious site," referring to the Temple Mount. Its name, of course, refers to the location of the most sacred ancient Jewish – not Palestinian – holy site, but Kingsley is oblivious to history.

According to the AP, the Netanyahu government's commitment to annex the West Bank would "add fuel to calls that Israel is an 'apartheid' state." Indeed, Israel's "most right-wing and religiously conservative administration ever," supported by "settlers and ultra-Orthodox parties that have vowed to reshape Israeli society," threatens Israel's "liberal democracy."

Isabel Kershner, a New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem, contributed her own dire analysis. Not only is the new minister of national security an "ultranationalist" who has expanded authority over the police. The new "hard-right" finance minister claims more authority over settlements in the "occupied" West Bank. And "ultra-Orthodox lawmakers" want more autonomy and funding for religious schools. Worse still, the new coalition wants to empower the Knesset to overrule Supreme Court rulings.

The looming question is whether Israelis on the Left can tolerate a right-wing government unlike any that has preceded it. Or whether, in the name of "democracy," their fury over a lost election will erupt in violent protest that could tear their country apart.

To locate it within a historical framework: Can the Israeli Left reject Ben-Gurion's appalling resort to violence against Jews and accept the result of a democratic election? Can it accept Netanyahu's reminder, "to lose in elections is not the end of democracy, this is the essence of democracy"?

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Unrelenting laceration of Israel has long been the hallmark of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. It began when, as a Brandeis University student, he joined Breira, a left-wing group demanding that Israel relinquish biblical Judea and Samaria, restored to the Jewish state during the Six-Day War, and recognize Palestinian national aspirations in that land.

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Years later, when he became Times' Jerusalem Bureau chief, Friedman seldom missed an opportunity to criticize Israel. He labeled it an "occupying power" while dismissing Palestinian terrorist attacks as merely a "poke in the ribs." He identified the violent intifada with the American struggle for civil rights. Returning to the United States as a Times columnist, he warned that without a two-state (Israel and Palestine) solution, Israel would "be stuck with an apartheid-like, democracy-sapping permanent occupation" of its biblical homeland.

Friedman's decades of criticism of Israel laid the groundwork for his recent Times diatribe (Jan. 18). He imagines that "a new Israel is emerging," with "many ministers having the audacity to be hostile to American values" – as if Israeli government officials must be bound to Thomas Friedman's political preferences. He continues writing that "nearly all are hostile to the Democratic Party," as though its embrace is a requirement for Israeli political leaders.

Friedman urges President Biden to "wade right in" to prevent Benjamin Netanyahu and his "extremist coalition from turning Israel into an illiberal bastion of zealotry." It seems oddly intrusive (except to Friedman) that an American president (to say nothing of a Times columnist) should tell an Israeli prime minister how to lead his country.

Friedman suggests that President Biden try to "nudge things onto a healthier path," while displaying "tough love." High among Friedman's citations is the determination of the Netanyahu government to "radically alter the situation in the West Bank" – biblical Judea and Samaria – by "effectively annexing it." Thomas Friedman may not like it, but the likelihood that Biden – or any American president – could persuade Israel to relinquish its biblical homeland is nil.

There is also the issue of the Temple Mount, the ancient Jewish holy site in Jerusalem's Old City. In Friedman's rendering, Biden must warn Netanyahu that his "extremist ministers" may "change the status quo on the Temple Mount," which prohibits Jewish prayer. That might "destabilize" Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and the Abraham Accords, which formalized diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab countries.

That Jews are the victims of discrimination on the Temple Mount, where the First and Second Temples once stood but they are prohibited from praying, is ignored by Friedman.

Friedman's self-appointed role as Biden's adviser is predictable. His laceration of the Jewish state has a long history. Israeli leaders are unlikely to pay attention to Friedman's fantasies. But he can find comfort in The New York Times, where unease with the Jewish state and its leaders is very common. Back in November, he wrote: "The Israel we know is gone." Alas, the Friedman we know is still here. Decades of unrelenting criticism suggest that he, not Netanyahu, may be the zealot.

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Every few years, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 16th year of his four-year term, addresses the UN General Assembly to plead the cause of Palestinian statehood that he has repeatedly undermined. Predictably, he blames Israel for its failure.

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In 2018, he appealed for "freedom, independence and justice for my oppressed people, who are suffering under Israeli occupation for more than 51 years." Not just an ordinary occupation, Abbas asserted, but a "colonial occupation [that] continues to suffocate us and undermine our serious efforts to build the institutions of our cherished state."

There would be no Palestinian recognition of Israel – as though that mattered to Israelis – "until Israel recognizes the State of Palestine on the 4 June 1967 borders" (which excluded Israel from its biblical homeland in Judea and Samaria). Indeed, he suggested, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague should investigate "the Israeli occupying forces' aggressions and settler terror against our people, our land and our holy sites."

As for holy sites, Abbas claimed without a shred of supporting evidence that "Israeli settlers and even the Israeli army trample daily on the holiness of holy sites including the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher." Neither of these holy sites showed any signs of being trampled upon. He neglected to mention that the mosque was located surely, not accidentally on the site of the ancient Jewish temples built millennia before the appearance of Islam.

Much of his fury focused on Israel's "racist" nation-state law that "denies the connection of the Palestinian people to their historic homeland," while dismissing "their right to self-determination and their history and heritage." Israel, he claimed, "practices racism, but it enshrined its practice of it with this law." In fact, the law did no more than identifying Israel as "the nation-state of the Jewish people," hardly a novel claim. "Peace in our region," Abbas concluded, "cannot be achieved without an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem – "occupied" since the Six-Day War in 1967 – as its capital. The "colonial, settler Israeli occupation" must end.

Abbas does not tire of repeating himself. Speaking to the UN General Assembly from Ramallah earlier this month, he demanded that Israel withdraw from "the Palestinian territory it occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem." If it did not, he warned, the PLO might even withdraw its recognition of Israel within its pre-1967 borders before biblical Judea and Samaria, until then comprising Jordan's "West Bank," were reclaimed as part of the Jewish state.

Furthermore, warned Abbas, if Israel did not move towards recognition of Palestinian statehood, the Palestinian Authority would appeal to the ICC to end Israel's "occupation of the land of the Palestinian state." But since the court only settles disputes between existing countries, it was an empty threat.

In perhaps his most noxious statement, Abbas defended welfare payments to the families of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel for their brutal terrorist attacks. "Why should we have to clarify and justify providing assistance to families of prisoners and martyrs, who are the victims of the occupation and its oppressive policies?" So terrorists become victims.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett recently made clear his opposition to a Palestinian state, stating: "I think it would be a terrible mistake." Showing every sign of resisting American pressure, he has reassured settler leaders that his new government would not slow construction. "We know what the Democrats are saying," Bennett told them. "The settlements are illegal and all that. They told me to build less. Guys, you know where I'm coming from. I'm committed to you." Despite pressure from the Biden administration, construction in Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem would continue.

Addressing the United Nations, Bennett firmly declared: "We are an ancient nation, returned to our ancient homeland, revived our ancient language, restored our ancient sovereignty. Israel is a Jewish miracle of Jewish revival."

Mahmoud Abbas might do well to pay attention. His dark fantasies of Israel's disappearance have been irreparably shattered.

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It seems likely that Donald Trump will be judged the worst president in American history. Yet, ironically, he is also likely to be remembered as the best president for Israel since Harry Truman recognized the fledgling Jewish state moments after its Proclamation of Independence on May 14, 1948.

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The gifts to Israel from former President Trump are well-known and, depending on whether one embraces or criticizes the Jewish state (and Trump), either deeply appreciated or sharply criticized. They include recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, providing Israel with vital protection on its northern border; the relocation of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thereby recognizing its capital that dates as far back as King David's rule; and de facto recognition of Israeli sovereignty over Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, the ancient homeland of the Jewish people.

Seldom noted among Trump's gift packages is his bold 2018 decision to defund rather than defend UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Administration established by the United Nations in 1949 for "the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees." Over time, however, its laudable original mission of financial support for Palestinian refugees in the Arab war to annihilate Israel at its birth in 1948 (an estimated 30,000 of whom are still alive) has morphed into funding the descendants of refugees, now numbering 5 million and guaranteed to increase unto eternity.

The Palestinian refugee scam is unmatched in history for any other suffering people – least of all for descendants of 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. UNRWA is the only UN agency authorized to help a particular group of refugees. Ironically, there are now as many UNRWA employees as there are living Palestinian refugees.

In August 2018, the Trump administration – specifically, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a Middle East adviser, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – cut American funding of UNRWA from $364 million to $60 million. The UN organization was predictably upset at the severe harm to its (self-described) "steadfast commitment to preserving dignity and opportunities" for its recipients and "life-saving humanitarian work."

A chorus of complaints erupted. Hady Amr, the deputy special envoy of Israel-Palestinian relations in the Obama administration, led the way. In a perversion of linkage, he stated: "Jews and Palestinians both have deep, unshakable attachments to the Holy Land." He seems unaware that there were no self-identified "Palestinians" – only Palestinian Arabs – until there was a Jewish state.

Furthermore, according to Amr, "both peoples have experienced deep levels of collective and individual trauma," thereby equating 700,000 Palestinian refugees who fled from their land with 6 million Jews who were systematically murdered.

Finally, for Amr, Israelis and Palestinians "have passionate attachments to the holy places in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Holy Land." True enough, though he avoids mention of Arab control over the Machpelah burial site for the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs in Hebron; and over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem where, as its name indicates, the First Temple was built by King Solomon in the 10th century BCE. Its replacement came five centuries later – more than a millennium before the appearance of Muhammad (on his flying horse Boraq) and Islam.

Within a week of Joe Biden's inauguration, The New York Times reported that his new administration was restoring relations with the Palestinians and renewing aid to Palestinian refugees. According to US Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Mills, this "remains the best way to ensure Israel's future as a democratic and Jewish state while upholding the Palestinians' legitimate aspirations for a state of their own and to live with dignity and security." A two-state solution, which Palestinians have repeatedly rejected, will enable Israel to live "in peace and security alongside a viable Palestinian state."

Based on decades of evidence to the contrary, which seems to be ignored by Biden and Mills, there is little likelihood that any favors from the Biden administration will persuade the Palestinian Authority to be amenable to a neighboring Jewish state. That is the equivalent of Israel's imagined willingness to relinquish the biblical homeland of the Jewish people to Palestinians. Whether President Joe Biden can accept reality remains to be seen.

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No Jews have been as relentlessly maligned as the Jews of Hebron. From the time of their arrival following the 1967 Six-Day War – 40 years after the murderous annihilation of its Jewish community by rampaging Arabs – they have become the pariahs of the Jewish people. Their presence in the city where the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people are entombed, and where King David reigned before relocating his throne to Jerusalem, is deemed to be an unlawful and immoral Israeli intrusion on the Palestinian residents of Hebron.

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The most recent contributor to this enduring falsehood is Tamara Neuman, an anthropologist and Research Fellow at the Middle East Institute at Columbia. The first page of her Introduction to Settling Hebron: Jewish Fundamentalism in a Palestinian City displays the misinformation that reveals her embedded bias. Gazing at the Machpelah shrine where, according to the biblical narrative, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah are entombed, she nonetheless discerns its "staunch witness to the site's Islamic character." Muslims, however, first appeared in the seventh century BCE long after the reign of King Herod, when the towering Machpelah enclosure was built.

It was, for Neuman, "impossible not to notice the deadening effects of the many [Israeli] soldiers deployed throughout a Palestinian urban area" – in translation, the ancient Jewish Quarter that was "established illegally" following the 1967 Six-Day War. Her tour guide was a founder of Breaking the Silence, a renegade group of ex-soldiers who oppose Jewish settlements. In a repetitive inversion of historical reality, she accuses Jewish settlers of "the remaking of many Palestinian areas into a geography of biblical sites and origins," as if Palestinians superseded millennia of Jewish habitation in Hebron. In Neuman's convoluted (and occasionally incomprehensible) rendering, "Jewish settlers establish a putative sense of the real, which arises from the very materiality of the scene."

Historically myopic, ignoring millennia of Jewish history in Hebron, she can only discern the "colonial backdrop" of a "land takeover" with "Jewish observance and forms of direct violence in order to erase the presence of an existing Palestinian population." As for erasure, it was Hebron Arabs who murderously obliterated the centuries-old Jewish community in 1929. She imaginatively, but falsely, describes their targeted violence against a tiny community of several hundred Jews and yeshivah students as "anti-colonial riots."

Ironically, given her book title, Neuman seems to have spent little time in Hebron, choosing instead to live for several months in the adjacent settlement of Kiryat Arba. An enclosed Jewish community up the hill – safe from the Palestinian terrorist attacks that have repetitively targeted the tiny Hebron Jewish community – it provided access to welcoming female residents, who comprised her primary sources of information.

But they, too, were blameworthy. The courageous group of Kiryat Arba women with their young children, who in the middle of a night in 1979 climbed by ladder into the former Beit Hadassah medical clinic to restore a Jewish presence in Hebron, were "spearheading a potentially violent act of settler expansion" into "Palestinian Hebron's Old City." They were guilty of "domesticating the space in ways that mobilized Jewish motherhood for settler gains." Such "maternal activism of ideological settler women" is clearly not to Neuman's liking, especially when it revived the long decimated Hebron Jewish community.

Similarly, "the transgressions, abuses and threats that have given the community of Kiryat Arba its notoriety" also extended to the restoration of the ancient Jewish cemetery up the hill from the Hebron Jewish Quarter, desecrated during the 1929 Arab rioting. Restored by a Kiryat Arba mother's determination to bury her stillborn baby there, Neuman describes it as "Palestinian land in an area that settlers referred to as the Jewish cemetery," as it had long been as anyone who reads the names and dates on its tombstones can instantly verify.

Perhaps most striking about a book titled Settling Hebron is how little time she spent there. There is no mention of a visit to the beautifully restored synagogue that was destroyed in 1929. She references the Beit Hadassah building (which she repetitively calls "the Daboya building") that was opened in 1893 as a medical clinic (with free medical care for Jews and Arabs), as "taken over" by Israelis, thereby imposing "the Jewish domestic character of Palestinian space." Had she actually spoken to any of its residents, she surely would have been guided to the adjacent museum that documents the long history of Jewish Hebron.

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But the writer had her own agenda to fulfill. It is most vividly exposed when she absurdly describes the joyous descent of Jews from Kiryat Arba to their Machpelah holy site on Shabbat Chayei Sarah as "ongoing forays of armed ideological settlers into Palestinian space." This, she writes, is "ethnicized space" for Jews that demonstrates "the spatial character of ethnic exclusivism." But the reality is that Jews are prohibited by Muslim authorities from entry into the stunningly beautiful Isaac Hall except for 10 days a year. It is Muslims, not Jews, who impose "ethnic exclusivism."

Neuman seems oblivious to the demographic reality that 500 Jews living in the Hebron Jewish Quarter are outnumbered by more than 20,000 Palestinians. And should she try to enter Arab Hebron – a thriving city of nearly 200,000 residents with shopping malls, high-rise apartment buildings and universities – she would be turned away because she is a Jew. If she writes a sequel based on history, not ideology, she might more accurately subtitle it "Palestinian Fundamentalism in a Jewish City."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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It's risky to predict how any new president might interact with Israel. Will President-elect Joe Biden follow in the footsteps of Barak Obama, his revered leader under whom Biden served as vice president? That is a question of consequence for Israel because Obama easily qualifies as the least friendly president to Israel since its inception on May 14, 1948. That evening, just 11 minutes after David Ben-Gurion, the country's first prime minister, declared independence, US President Harry S. Truman recognized the first Jewish state in more than two millennia. That set the presidential standard for an official American embrace of Israel.

Liberal Jews may cringe at the reality that the president who has followed most closely in Truman's footsteps is Donald Trump. Under his administration, Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights was recognized and the US Embassy was relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, implicitly reaffirming the ancient Jewish holy city as Israel's capital. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in his recent trip to Israel, visited the settlement of Psagot, near Ramallah, making him the first top American official to set foot in an Israeli settlement. In fact, it would not be surprising if Trump, in a farewell gift, recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the settlements, home to 430,000 Israelis living in their biblical homeland.

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But what about Biden and Israel? Will he embrace or reject the palpable hostility of Obama, his political idol? Clearly, Israelis are not optimistic. Anticipating the recent election, they favored Trump over Biden by a 2:1 majority. History is on their side.

Biden has frequently retold the story of his meeting with Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1973. Showing him maps of the region, she described Israel's precarious position. Noting his discomfort, she reassured him that Israelis had a secret weapon against hostile Arab states: They had nowhere else to go.

Nearly a decade later, Prime Minister Menachem Begin met with senators at the US Capitol. Biden advised him that the expansion of settlements would endanger American support for aid to Israel. Begin sharply responded: "Don't threaten us with slashing aid. Do you think that because the US lends us money it is entitled to impose on us what we must do," adding: "I am a proud Jew. Three thousand years of culture are behind me, and you will not frighten me with threats."

Biden backed off, over time showing signs of warming towards Israel. At the 2013 AIPAC Policy Conference, he dated his affection towards Israel from when he first heard the phrase "Never Again." It taught him that "the only way to ensure that it could never happen again was the establishment and the existence of a secure, Jewish state of Israel."

But Biden continued to waffle, especially as Obama's loyal vice president. At an Israeli Independence Day celebration in 2015, he promised that "if you were attacked and overwhelmed, we would fight for you." But Obama's support for a settlement freeze and a two-state solution based on pre-1967 lines, with a state of Palestine in biblical Judea and Samaria, commanded Biden's approval.

In the waning days of the Obama administration, Biden promoted UN Security Council Resolution 2334 declaring that settlements in "occupied Palestinian territory" are illegal. In a 2016 speech to left-wing J Street, he condemned "the steady and systematic expansion of settlements, the legalization of outposts, land seizures that are moving us toward a one-state reality, and that reality is dangerous." Biden declared: "We have an overwhelming obligation … to push [Israelis] as hard as we can toward what they know in their gut is the only ultimate solution – a two-state solution." He ignored decades of unrelenting Palestinian obduracy to that solution.

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Although Joe Biden has often touted himself as a "friend" of Israel, it has been, at best, an ambivalent friendship. He has promised to reverse the Trump administration's "destructive cut-off of diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority," while promising to reaffirm the demand of the Obama/Biden administration that Israel prohibit Jews from asserting their right to build homes in Judea and Samaria. Biden has also promised to reopen the PLO office in Washington closed by Trump and reinstate funding to the Palestinian Authority that Trump ended because it would not halt payments to terrorists.

In his waning days in office, Trump may yet have a farewell gift for Israel: recognition of its sovereignty over Jewish settlements. If delivered, it will be revealing to see whether President Biden resolves his ambivalent relationship with Israel. Will he embrace Barack Obama's hostility or Donald Trump's generosity? Time will tell.

Reprinted with permission fromJNS.org.

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Designated by the United Nations as "refugees" – defined as those who fled or were expelled from their homes (during Arab efforts to annihilate the fledgling Jewish state) – Palestinians were entitled to financial assistance from the UN Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA), established in 1949 solely for their benefit following a five-year period when Jewish refugees also received aid.

But the refugees are not the only beneficiaries. By authority of the UN General Assembly (1962), UNRWA also supports their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and generations to follow. No other refugee group enjoys these benefits. It is, in a word, a scam, and a profitable one for UNRWA employees, whose perpetual financial security is assured.

The actual number of genuine Palestinian refugees in 1947-48 has been much disputed and persistently inflated. In its first report, The New York Times (October 1948) cited "the flight of 80 percent" of the "500,000 Arabs" (not yet "Palestinians") who had inhabited land gained by Israel in its struggle for independence. Four years later, an editorial cited "850,000 Arab refugees." By November 1954, the number had increased to 900,000. In 1956, and again a decade later, Times editorials referred to "almost 1 million" refugees.

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But repetitive exaggeration is no substitute for careful research. Historian Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East Program at Kings College in London, has meticulously documented Palestinian refugee numbers by city, town and village. In total, he concludes in Palestine Betrayed (2010), Palestinian refugees numbered between 583,121 and 609,071. A tragedy to be sure; still, those of us whose grandparents survived European pogroms and fled to the United States hardly expected to receive financial support from the League of Nations, nor should we from UNRWA.

Now the full story has finally been told. In The War of Return, Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf carefully explore – and scathingly expose – "How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace." Their credentials are impeccable: Schwartz is a former staff writer and senior editor for Haaretz; Wilf served as foreign-policy adviser to Shimon Peres and was a member of the Knesset between 2010-2013. Their leftist political identities initially made me wary of yet another lament for the plight of Palestinian refugees amid the cruelty of Israeli conquerors. But The War of Return not only erased concern; it provides by far the most persuasive undermining of the conventional pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel narrative that still provides the political left with fodder for lacerating Israel.

It was, Schwartz and Wilf write, "the Arab rejection of partition that led to the Palestinian dispossession." A Palestinian national identity, demanding the "right of return," only began to emerge in refugee camps following the nakba, the "catastrophe" of flight in 1948 that coincided with the establishment of modern-day Israel. Fourteen years later, the UN General Assembly defined "refugees" to include descendants of actual refugees, thereby assuring that "the number of refugees would keep on growing forever."

Except for Jordan, every Arab nation denied citizenship rights to Palestinian refugees. This "policy of discrimination," the authors note, "played a key role in the construction of a distinct, political Palestinian identity." It did not take long before "the political desire to prolong the politicized status of 'refugees' determined their future" –and turned refugee camps into "a farce."

UNRWA defined its role as the stimulus for the development of a Palestinian national identity based upon "the violent resistance of Zionism." No such financial or ideological benefits were internationally provided to Holocaust survivors. UNRWA schools indoctrinated students "with claims of exclusive Palestinian rights over the entire land, the illegitimacy of the Jewish state" and the "unprecedented injustice" they confronted. Students were taught to face Israel and recite: "Palestine is ours. … We promise to shed our blood for you!" The result, Schwartz and Wilf conclude, was "a national identity built entirely around a sense of victimhood and injustice" for which Israel was conveniently blamed.

By 1988, according to an UNRWA report, there were more than 2 million Palestinian "refugees." Their "return," Schwartz and Wulf note, would effectively end Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Thirty years later, more than 5 million Palestinians were registered with UNRWA as "refugees," although only 30,000 actual refugees are estimated to still be alive – ironically, the same number as UNRWA staff employees.

Exposing the complicity of the United Nations in contriving and sustaining the never-ending Palestinian refugee scam, the two authors have served the cause of historical integrity. They have exposed the longest-running UN hoax, assuring descendants of Palestinian refugees unto eternity and providing their avid supporters with a cherished weapon for flagellating Israel.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Ocasio-Cortez has insisted that "criticizing the occupation of Palestine doesn't make you anti-Israel." Indeed, Palestinians have no choice but to "riot" because they are "marginalized" by Israel. But to her credit, she has conceded: "I am not the expert on geopolitics on this issue. I am just repeating terms I think I saw on Facebook once. I have no idea what they mean."

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How could Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who served as Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief between 1984-88 and a columnist ever since, endorse Ocasio-Cortez for anything but a kindergarten class on Israel and the Middle East? A cursory glance at Friedman's biography might provide answers.

Growing up in "a rather typical middle-class American Jewish family," Friedman identified himself as a "three-day-a-year" Jew until the Six-Day War ignited "my Jewish identity." After three summers as a kibbutz volunteer, he conceded, his identification with Israel had become "insufferable." 

But not for long. Smitten by Arab culture after a summer visit to Cairo, he resumed undergraduate study at Brandeis University as a member of the "Middle East Peace Group." It joined Breira ("alternative"), an organization comprising left-wing rabbis and Jewish intellectuals who endorsed Palestinian national aspirations.

Hired by The New York Times in 1981, Friedman covered the Israel-Lebanon war, which buried "every illusion I ever held about the Jewish state." Then, posted as Jerusalem Bureau Chief, he relied for guidance upon Peace Now advocate Yaron Ezrahi, peace activist Avraham Burg and Rabbi David Hartman, his mentor for explaining Israel's moral deficiencies.

As a Times columnist, Friedman blamed "feckless American Jewish leaders" and neo-conservatives for supporting "a colonial Israeli occupation." Friedman reminded readers: "One should never forget just how crazy some of Israel's Jewish settlers are. They assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin when he tried to cede part of the West Bank for peace."

Rabin's assassin, Yigal Amir, lived in the Israeli city of Herzliya.

As a relentless chronicler of Israel's failings, he claimed that he was helping to preserve its moral integrity.

For Friedman, Israeli settlement building was "sheer madness." He predicted that without a two-state solution, "Israel will be stuck with an apartheid-like, democracy-sapping, permanent occupation of the West Bank." How Israel could "occupy" its biblical homeland was not explained. He seemed surprised that "Palestinian" and "terrorist" were "fused together in the minds of people the world over."

Enamored of former US President Barack Obama, whose hostility to Israel was palpable, Friedman preposterously claimed that the only question was whether he was "the most pro-Israel president in history or just one of the most." The answer, to be sure, was neither.

In fact, Obama was the least friendly towards the Jewish state. During his first official visit to Israel, the Times gushed a chorus of praise for his peace effort. Obama, Friedman wrote, "embraced Israelis with both understanding and honesty" by suggesting that Israel "collaborate with Palestinians to build a West Bank state that is modern, secular and Westernizing." Otherwise, "scary religious nationalist zealots" might lead Israel into the "dark corner" of a "South African future," or a binational state "controlled by Jewish extremists."

It long ago became evident that Friedman's "insufferable" boyhood identification with Israel had faded away. Indeed, unbeknown to him, his path closely followed that of Joseph Levy, hired by the Times in 1928 as its first "Palestine correspondent." A year later, when Arab riots erupted, Levy participated in covert discussions with H. St. John Philby, a former British civil servant who had denounced the Balfour Declaration as "an act of betrayal for whose parallel … we have to go back to the Garden of Gethsemane"; Judah Magnes, Hebrew University Chancellor who advocated a binational state in Palestine; and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, convicted of inciting the 1921 riots. 

Levy funneled lengthy statements by Magnes and Philby into the Times. Guided by Levy, it became a welcoming platform for anti-Zionist critics.

If Joseph Levy sought to undermine the Zionist pursuit of Jewish statehood, Thomas Friedman has relentlessly lacerated its Israeli reality. Perhaps the only consolation is that he did not propose Ocasio-Cortez as ambassador to Israel.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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