Rabbi Abraham Cooper vs Dr. Steven Jonas: A Debate on Israel Policy and the War in Gaza
On January 9, From The G-Man published a commentary that was submitted by Rabbi Abraham Cooper, who is the Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading global Jewish human rights organization. The article was entitled “The 2023 Chief Gatekeepers of Hypocrisy Who Continued to Elevate the Palestinian Cause to an Untouchable Status.” Shortly after its publication, Dr. Steven Jonas, Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook Medicine in New York, submitted responses to several statements Rabbi Cooper made in the article. The statements and responses are being presented in a debate format.
Rabbi Cooper: For decades, world leaders, the mainstream media, donor nations, human rights NGOs, and academia have all elevated the Palestinian cause to an untouchable status. Through thick and thin, from the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes to the UN General Assembly equating Zionism with racism, and from serial anti-Israel resolutions at the UN Human Rights Commission (now Council) to the virulently anti-Israel and antisemitic 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism, in Durban, South Africa, not to mention throughout bloody intifadas, horrific suicide bombings, missiles, knifings, car rammings, and drive-by shootings, there hasn’t been one crime, not even the most heinous, that has ever merited explicit worldwide condemnation of the Palestinian cause.
In 2023, we witnessed the blocking of airports and roadways, the destruction of Hanukkah menorahs, and the disruption of Christmas charity events and celebrations by pro-Palestinian supporters. There was even a mob of pro-Hamas protesters chanting “Allahu akbar” at the entrance to the 9/11 World Trade Center Memorial, underneath which lie the microscopic ashes of over 3,000 innocent victims of terrorism.
Dr. Jonas: Note: “United Nations Resolution 181, resolution passed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 1947 that called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with the city of Jerusalem as a corpus separatum (Latin: “separate entity”) to be governed by a special international regime. The resolution—which was considered by the Jewish community in Palestine to be a legal basis for the establishment of Israel, and which was rejected by the Arab community—was succeeded almost immediately by violence.”
Very briefly, in part because of three Arab-country invasions of Israel — the “6-country war” at the time of Partition (1947), the “Six Day War” (1967), and the “Yom Kippur War” (1973), the portion of the original Partition has been gradually expanded in favor of the State of Israel. The position of the representatives of the Palestinian people on what the proper resolution of the conflict should be has varied over time. As it has in Israel. In the 1990s the draft of a comprehensive agreement to create a “two-state solution” was drafted in Oslo, Norway. Progress was being made on implementing it until the assassination of the leading Israeli political figure who was promoting it and attempting to move along to create a “two-state solution.” Itzhak Rabin was assassinated by a far-right Israeli terrorist in 1995.
Since that time, there have been various attempts to move the process along, but, with fault on both sides, obviously none have been met with success. Politically, in Israel the Far Right, under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, which is totally opposed to the two-state solution, has become gradually stronger. There have been no meaningful negotiations since the early 2000s.The present government, which has major Palestinian-expulsionist elements in it, is clearly implementing that policy in the West Bank. The present government has made it clear, functionally at least, that any kind of two-state solution is no longer anywhere on the table. Without going into any detail, the current Israel-Hamas War serves the purposes of both sides: that there shall never be a two-state solution.
The Palestinian atrocities that Rabbi Cooper mentioned indeed happened and were horrible/inexcusable. However, there is a lengthy list of Israel atrocities as well; from the “Nakba” during the first Israeli-Arab war in which hundreds-of-thousands of Palestinians were forcibly evicted from land which had been allotted to them under the original UN Resolution to what is going on now in the West Bank, in which unarmed Palestinian civilians are being shot dead by Israeli “Settlers” (a significant number of whom, by the way, are Orthodox Jews from the US, who are retaining their US passports).
Rabbi Cooper: It seems that no deed can change the elite’s embrace of the Palestinian cause. In any discussion following such outrages, the default response is always: “Yes, but…”. “Yes, it was very unfortunate that Israeli athletes were killed … or that a pregnant woman was killed by a bomb at Jerusalem’s Sbarro pizzeria … but what choice do the Palestinians have as they live in the outdoor concentration camp that is Gaza, that they are victims of colonial occupation, that they are crushed by an apartheid regime.”
Dr. Jonas: For many years, in writing about Israel-Palestine, I have used the words “world’s largest concentration camp” to describe Gaza. One thing for sure, given the intensity of Israeli destruction above the above-ground structures, it will never be that again.
Rabbi Cooper: So, perhaps it was naïve to think that, somehow, Oct. 7 would be different. On that day, more Jews were murdered than on any day since the end of the Nazi Holocaust in 1945; on Oct. 7, videos taken by Hamas terrorists themselves showed how they targeted entire civilian families whom they shot and burned to death; how they turned a peace concert into a charnel house; how Israeli women and girls were raped, beheaded, and mutilated. Hundreds were kidnapped and taken hostage, and over 100 may still be alive in underground captivity that defies imagination.
Dr. Jonas: First of all, the attack was horrible and brutal beyond words. There is no excuse for it. It accomplished nothing for the Palestinians, except the invasion and destruction of Gaza. However, no one yet knows exactly how it was allowed to occur:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/29/world/middleeast/israel-intelligence-hamas-attack.html
See also my column on the complete failure of the electronic fence along the Israeli-Gaza border: https://www.opednews.com/articles/The-SJ-Killer-Fence–Is-Gaza-Strip_Israel_Israel-And-Palestine_Israel-Attacks-Gaza-231110-568.html.
Rabbi Cooper: And through it all, we’ve mostly witnessed silence or acquiescence to the terrorists. The International Red Cross refused requests from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and families of the hostages to try to deliver life-saving medicine to the hostages. However, they found the time to get forms to the captured Hamas terrorists in Israeli jails to fill out so they and their families could be quickly compensated under the Palestinian Authority’s “pay-to-slay Jews” law.
Dr. Jonas: I cannot speak to what the Red Cross did or didn’t do. However, it appears the civilian population of Gaza is on the verge of starvation (https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/01/1145227).
Rabbi Cooper: Now, at the outset of 2024, before the media rushes off to interview pundits about Gaza’s “day after” and before UN entities, led by such pillars of human rights as Iran, China, and Russia, cook up more slanderous accusations against the Jewish state, it is important to identify the chief gatekeepers of human dignity who are largely responsible for the silence, hubris, and hypocrisy that enabled the brutal victimizer to quickly pivot to the cloak of victimhood while casting the people of Israel as “instruments of genocide.”
Dr. Jonas: The aforementioned statement is a typical diversionary tactic of those who are trying to defend policies which have led to massive death and destruction of civilians and their infrastructure: attacking outside individuals for what they did or did not do, what they said or did not say. In certain contexts, this sort of thing is very effective. I agree with at least some of the particulars the rabbi raises. But they are very much beside the point, in terms of what is going on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank. In this case, in terms of what has happened to the citizens of Gaza, what is happening to the Palestinian citizens of the West Bank, and how the Israeli-right’s policy of expulsionism is being carried out before our very eyes, it is useful only for distraction from what is happening to the Palestinians (for whom, by the way, Hamas cares as much as Likud does).
Rabbi Cooper: Regarding the chief gatekeepers, here are a few notables:
First and foremost, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. In the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 crimes against humanity, the world’s chief human rights executive declared, “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” alleging “56 years of suffocating occupation” suffered by the Palestinians and adding that Hamas’ massacres “did not warrant the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.” It took Guterres 70 days to watch the 43 minutes of video taken by Hamas gunmen of their horrific onslaught of mass murder, rape, mutilation, kidnapping, and hostage-taking.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, allegedly an objective observer of the Palestinians, described Hamas terrorists as “human rights defenders.” She legitimized the launching of missiles targeting Israeli civilians and elevated Hamas criminals onto the same moral plane as the Jews who fought back against the Nazis in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Albanese also unleashed this bizarre but deadly serious charge against the Israel Defense Forces (IDF): “Israel cannot claim the right of self-defense against a threat that emanates from a territory it occupies, from a territory that is under belligerent occupation.”
In her Commission of Inquiry report presented to the UN General Assembly two weeks after Oct. 7, Albanese declared that “the oppression and trauma suffered by Palestinian children, half of the Palestinian population under Israeli rule, is a unique stain on the international community.” No official word on whether Albanese also considers the burning of Jewish babies a stain on the international community.
UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Amsalem. It took The New York Times over two months to finally acknowledge in print that Israeli women and girls were special targets of Hamas invaders. And this was only after the gut-wrenching descriptions of the crimes against Jewish women and girls were confirmed by released hostages. Meanwhile, Amsalem did find the time to weigh in on the controversy over trans-athletes but refused to unequivocally condemn Hamas for the sexual abuse of Israeli women when it counted. She initially dismissed it all as “disinformation.”
Indeed, the Jordanian-born Alsalem went further, declaring that since Oct. 7, “the assault on Palestinian women’s dignity and rights has taken on new and terrifying dimensions.” She also alleged Israel’s “continued assault on the reproductive rights of Palestinian women and their newborns has been relentless and is particularly alarming,” and accused Israel of “imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group.”
Sarah Douglas, the deputy chief for peace, security, and resilience at UN Women, endorsed a string of incendiary claims on social media following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. Though her position demands neutrality, Douglas “liked” tweets that condemned Israeli “genocide” and claimed the “forces of empire” were teaming up to crush the Palestinian people’s “struggle for freedom.”
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) motto, “For every child,” would be more accurate if it said: “For every child, unless you are an Israeli Jew.” Following the Oct. 7 massacre, UNICEF was largely silent when it came to the execution of 40 Israeli infants and the murder of entire Jewish families by Hamas terrorists. They made no effort to demand the immediate and unconditional release of the 32 Israeli children kidnapped to Gaza by Hamas. Instead, their efforts were solely focused on getting humanitarian aid to the Palestinian children in Gaza who also suffer at the hands of Hamas. In fact, contributors to UNICEF have discovered there is no way to direct funds to help tens of thousands of Israeli children displaced and traumatized by Hamas and Hizbullah attacks.
Finally, UNRWA—the only UN refugee agency whose purpose is not to resettle refugees. In 2023, UNRWA still conferred refugee status on nearly 6 million descendants of the original roughly 700,000 1948 Palestinian refugees, even if they are citizens of other countries! This manipulation allows Palestinians to insist that millions have the “right to return” en masse to the space currently inhabited by over 9 million citizens of Israel. Such a move would spell the end of the Jewish State.
UNRWA’s 2023 budget of $1.63 billion funds their schools, where generations of Palestinian children have been indoctrinated to hate Jews and revere terrorist “martyrs.” Now, the IDF has provided proof that Hamas uses UNRWA schools and adjacent areas to store weapons, including explosive vests fitted for children. UNRWA employees and facilities are part of the Hamas war machine.
At a recent meeting at the US State Department, I urged Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as well as officials of other donor nations, not to treat UNRWA as a key part of the solution to Gaza’s misery. UNRWA is, in fact, a key component of the ongoing problems that plague Palestinian society. Simply put, UNRWA must be dismantled. Let the donor nations set up an escrow fund for non-terrorist Palestinians to guide their people’s future sans the Hamas-controlled UNRWA, ending the disastrous multigenerational refugee status of Palestinians.
Seventy-five years of misplaced sympathies and wishful thinking have brought the entire Middle East to the brink.
Moving forward in the New Year, anyone committed to trying to improve the lives of Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the Middle East should be guided by the ancient Midrash, which warns that those “who are compassionate to the cruel will ultimately become cruel to the compassionate.”
Dr. Jonas: About the “75 years,” agreed, if one also includes the effective Israeli refusal, from the beginning, to accept some sort of two-state solution which was at the center the original UN partitioning resolution. One must also recognize that this part of the original Israeli Declaration of Independent (the only official document referring to the nature of the Israeli state — it has no Constitution) has been completely ignored:
“While Israel has no Constitution, it does have a Declaration of Independence, dating from 1948. Here is what it has to say about Israeli citizenship:
“The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
Do you want a definition of the word “irony?” Well folks, in terms of the State of Israel under Likud, here it is.
Rabbi Cooper: It’s time to hold all parties—starting with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian Authority, Hizbullah, and the murderous Iranian regime—accountable for their actions, or the entire world may soon reap the whirlwind.
Dr. Jonas: Indeed, it’s also how 75 years of Israeli policy, on the ground, has made any kind of two-state solution impossible and centrally contributed to the current state of affairs.
Update – January 20, 12:22 p.m. (ET): Dr. Jonas informed the news office that he made additional comments in an article that was recently published on OpEdNews.com. You can read the revised article here.