By Kevin Dube – 1/25
On October 7th, 2023 Hamas launched a horrific assault on Israel that resulted in the largest single day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. This was not a military operation, but rather a coordinated terrorist attack on a massive scale.
Civilians, including children, were brutally raped and murdered in ways that even the most ardent Nazi SS officer would find extreme. Truly the perpetrators of this depraved attack committed war crimes worthy of execution at the Hauge.
As a result of this unconscionable attack Israel exercised its absolute right to retaliate. One would think, much as after 9/11, the Western world would gather around our ally in the Middle East. However, this has not been the case.
As recently as October, a group called MassCUE (Massachusetts Computer Using Educators), in partnership with the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, held their fall education tech conference at Gillette Stadium. At this conference, during a panel on equity in education, panelists brought up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, referring to “Israeli genocide” and “Israeli apartheid” with one panelist stating the teaching of the Holocaust has been one-sided and “two perspectives need to be taught.”
This has to be repeated; this is a conference which the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents is a partner in which a presenter is stating that two perspectives need to be taught regarding the Holocaust.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that an organization that sees Israel’s fully justified retaliation on a group that wantonly raped and murdered civilians as an act of genocide would also think that the Nazi program of the eradication of Jews was justified. What is surprising is that a conference by a group whose cause is to promote computer literacy among teachers, and co-sponsored by Massachusetts school superintendents, would include such rhetoric.
Sadly, this antisemitic rhetoric is nothing new in here in the Commonwealth. Bastions of higher education such as Harvard, Tufts, MIT and others have hosted long term anti-Jewish camps on their campuses. Their leaders unwilling to condemn these actions as hate speech. The Massachusetts Teacher’s Association (MTA) also got in on the act this year passing a resolution stating: “The MTA President and Vice President will urge the president of the NEA to pressure President Biden to stop funding and sending weapons in support of the Netanyahu government’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people in Gaza.”
To be clear, Israel’s defensive attacks on their enemies is in no way an act of genocide. There are less than 16 million Jews in the world today. 43% of those are in Israel, 40% are in the US, and the rest are scattered throughout the globe.
By contrast there are 1.9 billion Muslims in the world. To the charge that Israel is an apartheid state, nothing could be farther from the truth. Israel is the only western democracy in the Middle East. Every Israeli citizen is a full participant. There are Muslim Israeli citizens serving in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and there have been Muslim members of the Israeli Parliament.
Israel is also not a colonist state, but rather is in fact the ancestral homeland of the Jews with a verifiable three-thousand-year history. There has never been an independent nation of Palestine, that is a word made up by various occupiers of the region. However, there was a Jewish Kingdom of Israel some 1,600 years before Islam was created. That is historical fact.
The myth of a two-state solution is a joke. Our Massachusetts federal elected representatives, such as Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, and Seth Moulton still cling to this myth. The reality is that Israel has offered this solution no less than five times in the past, and each time the Palestinians have rejected it. The truth is the Palestinians have no interest in a two-state solution. The chant of “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” is their mantra.
The river is the Jordan, and the sea is the Mediterranean. In between is all of Israel. That chant in fact means they want the elimination of Israel; a one Islamic Palestinian state with the destruction of Israel and all the Jews currently living there. Truly it is a chant of Genocide worthy of the Third Reich.
This conflict reached us here in North Andover when a petition to raise the Palestinian flag on our common was put forward. Our select board members’ hands were tied under the law, they had to vote to allow the flag to be flown. However, the shame is on those that brought forth the petition to fly the flag and those that supported it. Tensions ran high at the select board meeting where the vote was held.
The meeting was moved from its usual location to the High School auditorium. A large number of Palestinian supporters arrived, mostly from out of town, intimidating those speaking against flying that flag, such that one Jewish speaker would not even state her name for fear of retribution. Most horrific in this display was the Jewish chair of the North Andover Democratic Town Committee standing up to support the raising of the Palestinian flag to a backdrop of chants of “to the river to the sea.”
Fortunately, not only for our Jewish friends and our Israeli allies, but for all US Citizens and those that value Western exceptionalism, this time of madness will soon be behind us. Once again, the most pro-Israel President will be inaugurated less than three weeks from this column’s publication date. While sanity is being restored to the Presidency, Massachusetts Democrats are still spouting antisemitic rhetoric.
If you’ve had enough of this anti-western values governance, please send me an email at northandovergop@gmail.com. Kevin Dube is president of the North Andover Republican Town Committee.