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To Students Protesting an Honorary Doctorate to Israeli President Herzog
(Los Angeles Jewish Journal) Prof. Gil Troy - Ten Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) students recently protested the granting of an honorary doctorate to Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog. The website of JTS, affiliated with Conservative Judaism, declares that it "is deeply committed to strengthening the North American Jewish community's ties to Israel and to sharing the centrality of Israel to Jewish peoplehood." We believe in healthy argument. But Judaism didn't survive for 3500 years by only debating and never standing for anything. Judaism has preserved defining principles, including the Land of Israel's centrality and a love for the Jewish people, 45% of whom live in Israel. Honoring their president honors them, our brothers and sisters still bravely fighting a war for their survival against evil jihadists. Please, don't be dupes delighting the anti-Zionists who hate us, Israel, and America - and would happily kill you too. Don't ape their genocide libel. One of you told the Forward: "I feel like there's a genocide happening." Your job as academics is not to "feel" but to assess. Research what genocide means. Read the UN definition requiring "intent" to eliminate a people, "wherever" they are. Discover the UN's urban warfare standard that democratic armies often legitimately kill ten civilians for every combatant. Herzog said shortly after the Oct. 7. massacre: "It's an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians who were not aware or not involved." Test the claim: Did Palestinians celebrate in Gaza and elsewhere on Oct. 7, with one poll showing 74% cheering the slaughter? Did any hostage, including a few who evaded their captors, find even one Palestinian helping? Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a leading Jewish theologian and professor at JTS, expressing the Jewish consensus, wrote that "To abandon these bonds to Israel" was "to deny our identity." He called the Zionist idea - meaning the Jewish "right, its title, to the Land of Israel" - an "intimate ingredient of Jewish consciousness...at the core of Jewish history, a vital element of Jewish faith." Heschel said: "Auschwitz is in our veins." Who dares suggest that "we, the generation that witnessed the holocaust, should stand by calmly while [Arab] rulers proclaim their intention to bring about a new holocaust?" That didn't make Heschel "pro-war" but "pro-life." You owe President Herzog an apology for calling him "pro-war," given Israel's reluctance to crush Hamas, Hizbullah, and Iran until they attacked us viciously. The writer, a Distinguished Scholar of North American History at McGill University, is a Senior Fellow in Zionist Thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute.