Jodi Ruderon is editor-in-chief of The Forward¸ an American Jewish news service that began more than a century ago as the Yiddish daily newspaper Der Forverts and moved recently to online-only publication. It is a jewel of American Jewish culture, with an editorial orientation that has been center-left for much longer than anyone now living has been around. I am a subscriber, and I just sent this letter to Rudoren in response to an opinion piece she sent out by email.
As a former Israeli peace activist and dual American-Israeli citizen, I find your demand for a unilateral Israeli ceasefire in the war against Hamas appalling. Far from being the only moral course of action, as you claim, this is a reprehensible call for Israel to lay down its arms and allow Hamas and its backers in the Iranian regime to proclaim victory and a large step toward the destruction of the “Zionist regime,” by which they mean all 7 million Israeli Jews and countless Palestinian Israeli citizens to boot.
Far from causing the global tsunami of antisemitism to subside, as you imply, this Israeli defeat would further energize the Jew haters, convincing them that the cowardly Jews can be attacked, humiliated, and destroyed with impunity. The Islamic world, Europe, and North America would all suffer too as the Hamas “victory” would reinvigorate the ISIS psychopaths.
It also does not escape attention that you claim that Israel accepting defeat as you demand would lead to “the release of as many hostages as possible”—i.e., not all the hostages, whom you implicitly are willing to give up for dead or years of captivity, as long as you don’t have to listen anymore to fake progressives screaming in your ear the lie that Israel is committing genocide. Nor can one fail to note your backhanded defense of the Qatari propaganda outlet Al Jazeera, and your acceptance of the Hamas propaganda figures about the number of civilian deaths in Gaza, which you falsely attribute to the UN, and which Professor Abraham Wyner, a statistician at Wharton, has conclusively proven to be fabricated.
I yield to nobody in finding Netanyahu a despicable, self-serving failure, and his fascist political allies abhorrent and dangerous. I also yield to nobody in demanding food and protection for civilians in Gaza. But most Israelis understand the fight against Hamas as a fight for our lives, one you are uninterested in pursuing to the end. I and the vast majority of Israelis say “khalas” [enough, already, an Arabic word popular as Israeli slang] to Hamas, which was instrumental in destroying the chance for an Israeli-Palestinian peace in the 1990s along with thousands of innocent lives.
Emanuel Goldstein 