A few weeks ago in London, a Jewish woman stood at a Jewish real estate fair in a Jewish synagogue and pressed a strip of tape over the name of a Jewish city so that no one would see that people were being offered homes in Ma’ale Adumim, where 40,000 Jews live in their ancestral Jewish homeland. She did it with her own hands. No British official ordered her to do so. No policeman stood at her shoulder. She looked at the name of a city in the Land of Israel and decided that it was safer to hide both that “illicit” city and her integrity.
Let me dispense at once with the defense some well-meaning friend will rush to offer: that even peace negotiators have long conceded that Ma’ale Adumim will remain Israeli under any peace deal. So, they will ask: What difference does it make?
To discuss this means already having surrendered because it accepts that the legitimacy of a Jew’s home is a thing that waits on the world’s permission. The tape is the whole story. The tape is the confession. Everything else is a footnote.
This is especially true because of the conduct of the authorities. More than 100 Parliament members and peers signed a letter demanding that the British government shut down an event whose crime was offering British Jews homes in the Jewish homeland. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper rose in the Commons to announce that she had sicced the Advertising Standards Authority on a property fair, as though the greatest threat to the British public was a brochure with a floor plan of an apartment in Givat Ze’ev.
Zack Polanski, the Israel-hating Jewish leader of the Green Party, found even a government inquiry insufficient and stated that the matter “needs to be escalated to the Metropolitan Police Service immediately.” These people are at least honest about their hatred. In the perverse moral universe of the modern-yet-primitive Western left, a Jew selling a Jew an apartment is a matter for the constabulary, while the mob screaming outside a synagogue is the authentic voice of conscience.
Understand precisely what is being criminalized. Not violence. Not fraud. Not incitement. Not terror. The transaction under investigation is a Jew choosing to live in Judea and Samaria, in the land that gives Judea its name and the Jew his.
This is part of the oldest project in Europe, the project that once drew up expulsion edicts and stitched on yellow badges, and today has learned to do its work with a committee letter and a regulator’s inquiry. The instruments grow more polite with each passing century, yet beneath the letterhead, the fury burns exactly as hot as it did among the pogrom mobs. The question underneath never changes. It is always where, if anywhere on this earth, the Jew will be permitted to live.
Let us retire the slogan that the haters scream the loudest. Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria are not illegal under international law. They are illegal only under the international law of the imagination, chanted by people who have never read a line of the actual instruments.
The San Remo Resolution of 1920 and the League of Nations Mandate that grew from it recognized the right of the Jewish people to close settlement on the land west of the Jordan. Article 80 of the United Nations Charter expressly preserved those rights when the League dissolved. The Fourth Geneva Convention, invoked endlessly and read never, was written to outlaw the forcible deportations of World War II, not the voluntary decision of a Jew to buy an apartment, and it speaks of territory seized from a prior sovereign, when no state held lawful title to Judea and Samaria before 1967. Add the doctrine of uti possidetis juris, and the legal case for Jews buying land and settling in Judea and Samaria is not merely defensible; it is overwhelming.
The screamers simply prefer the slogan to the statute because the slogan does not require them to read. And if they ever read the original deed—the Bible—all they could do is ignore, deny or resort to peak teeth-gnashing.
A person with a spine cannot be entrapped into saying what they would proudly say in the open.
The disgrace did not begin when activists slipped inside the event with their cameras. It began before the doors ever opened, when the organizers, the host synagogue and the Board of Deputies of British Jews colluded to go out of their way to reassure the putatively nervous public that no properties beyond their sacralized “Green Line” would be shown.
The Board of Deputies felt compelled to soothe the very activists who march to erase every Jew from the Land of Israel, quaveringly promising them that no Jew would be offered a home in Judea. Its acting president, Adam Cohen, declared that the organizers had refuted any claim of marketing over the Green Line, and complained the accusation was being used to justify antisemitism.
Absurdly and most sadly, Cohen had it exactly backward. It is the grovel itself that feeds the antisemite, who is nourished by nothing so much as the spectacle of his quarry agreeing that the absurd accusation is shameful, scurrying to prove he would never do the dreadful thing he stands accused of.
So, they groveled before the event and groveled again after. The organizers pronounced it outrageous that anyone would deny British Jews the right to buy property “whether in Paris, New York or Israel.” Bravo! But wait, here it comes. In the same statement, they apologized, confessing that homes in Givat Ze’ev and Kfar Eldad had appeared in the event’s brochure, calling it an error.
As noted above, the real estate agency owner went even further. She taped over the name of Ma’ale Adumim, and when buyers came asking for it, she did not proudly say, “Yes, here is the listing.” She furtively slipped them two fliers under the table, in a bag, with instructions not to look at the contents inside the building. Not to look. Inside a synagogue. At a picture of a Jewish home.
I have spent a quarter century as a volunteer pulling living and dead Jews from wreckage and rubble, from buses blown apart on their morning routes and platforms where gunmen cut down commuters. We know how to bury our dead when enemies kill them. That is an old grief, and we have learned how to carry it.
What we do not know how to carry is the sight of Jews burying their own dignity with their own hands, in a room where no enemy stands, and burying it not even for safety but to protect a few commissions. This is lower than the shtetl, because the Jew in the shtetl crouched to keep his children alive. These merchants crouched to keep a sale. The antisemite’s deepest victory is not the Jew he frightens or the Jew he kills. It is the Jew he recruits against a brother whose only crime is refusing to hide in a land where all Jews should recognize that hiding became passé a long time ago.
The owner, still trying to hide, later pleaded that the buyers were a setup. Perhaps they were. It changes nothing. A person with a spine cannot be entrapped into saying what they would proudly say in the open. The sting worked precisely because the shame was real and the haters obviously recognized a Jew who would collude.
So let me say to the agents, the organizers and the board that lent them cover: Hang your heads. Not because you were caught, but because your trained and inherited muscle memory was to cover the name of a Jewish city as if it were a moral wound. And let me say to the clients who want to buy actual homes in their actual homeland: Find another agent, one who will say the name Ma’ale Adumim at full volume, who understands that there is no shame in a Jew living in Zion and infinite shame in pretending otherwise. Even at the risk of losing those blessed commissions by standing up in the “wrong” places.
There is an old Yiddish phrase for what these Jews did, the whispered commandment of the powerless: Sha shtil, makht nisht keyn shande far di goyim. “Hush, be still, make no scandal before the gentiles.”
It was the survival code of a people who had no army, no state, no recourse but invisibility, and, in its time, it kept some of us alive. But that time is over. We have a state. We have an army. We have Ma’ale Adumim. And still these merchants reach for the old crouch as though the Cossack were at the door, when the only thing at the door is a fellow Jew who wants to come home.
The land is not contraband. The deed to it is not a crime. The day Jews stop whispering the names of their own cities is the day the haters finally lose. Until then, the tape stays sickly pasted over the beautiful city in Zion it tries to hide in the England that birthed the York Massacre, the Edict of Expulsion, numerous blood libels and other forms of Jew-hatred.
The only questions are whether some of our fear-sick brethren will stop their shameful hiding and how some of our homesick brethren will bypass such tragic obstacles to discover what too many are still trying to hide.
