O pinion
Israel Must Remain a Jewish Majority Country
BY HERBERT CHUBIN
IN HER ESSAY published in
the March 8 issue of the Jewish
Daily Forward, Sari Bashi, a
Jewish human rights lawyer
and the research director at
Democracy for the Arab World
Now (DAWN), faults Israel
for not granting citizenship to
Palestinian residents of Gaza
and the West Bank. She says
Israel “grants citizenship to
Jews and their descendants,
including millions of Arab
Jews like me, descended from
Arabic-speaking families
in Iraq, Morocco and other
Arab countries. But it denies
the rights of citizenship to
Palestinian residents of Gaza
and the West Bank, even
though nearly half of them
descend from refugees from
what is now internation-
ally recognized as the State
of Israel, and all of them live
under Israeli rule.”
What kind of logic must a
person use to reach such an
illogical conclusion? Tens of
thousands of Jews have given
their lives in the past 100-plus
years to create a Jewish majority
country — the only one in
the world — and hundreds of
thousands of Jews have sought
refuge in that Jewish majority
country during the same time
period. Yet Bashi asserts that
Democracy for Palestinians
can only be achieved once
Israel ceases to be a Jewish
majority country.

How does one respond? By
reminding her, and others who
think like her, of the conse-
quences that befell Jews when
Israel did not exist, and based
on history, will happen to Jews
if Israel ceases to exist as a
Jewish majority nation.

In 1948, Israel was estab-
lished with the help of the
United Nations in a portion
of the Jews historic homeland.

Since then, hundreds of
thousands of Jews have found
safety in Israel. Bashi conve-
niently forgets to mention that
most Jews were forced to flee to
Israel from the Arab Muslim
majority countries that she
refers to above, with only the
cloths on their backs.

Hatred for Jews has existed
for millennia, but inten-
sified with the beginning of
Christianity. For almost 2,000
years, generation after gener-
ation of Christians sought
revenge against Jews for the
alleged murder of Jesus Christ.

This desire for revenge has
taken on a life of its own.

World War II laid bare
this phenomenon. Despite
being persecuted themselves
by Nazi Germany, many of
the citizens of the conquered
European countries assisted
the Nazis in murdering their
Jewish inhabitants. Some
were so committed that,
even after the war ended,
many surviving Jews were
murdered by their fellow
countrymen when they tried
to return to their homes.

Should Israel cease to exist,
will any country or group of
countries offer sanctuary to the
seven million Jews that live in
Israel? One only has to look
back at 2,000 years of history
and to World War II for the
answer. All the leading nations
of the world, including the
United States, found reasons to
keep us out during World War
II, directly contributing to the
deaths of millions of Jews.

There have been three
mass extinctions of Jews by
Christians: first during the
Crusades, followed by the
Spanish Inquisition and, in the
past century, the Holocaust. In
between those events there was,
and still is, ongoing persecu-
tion of Jews. According to the
Pew Research Center, Jews, now
largely concentrated in Israel
and the United States, number
only one fifth of one percent
(0.2%) of the world’s population.

Contrary to popular belief,
there has not been a reemer-
gence of antisemitism; it never
went away. Antisemites again
feel that they can openly express
and carry out their hatred for
Jews without fear of retalia-
tion. For example, according to
the ADL, in the United States
there were 2,100 incidents of
antisemitism in 2019, a 12%
increase, the most in any year
since the ADL began tracking
them four decades ago.

The continued existence
of the Jewish majority State
of Israel must be ensured for
future generations of Jews both
living in Israel and living in the
diaspora. As such, Palestinians
must never be allowed to
achieve through diplomacy
what they have been prevented
from achieving through the
force of arms: the end of Israel
as a Jewish majority nation. l
Longtime business executive
Herbert Chubin, a Philadelphia
native, moved from Yardley to
Bethesda, Maryland, eight years
ago. He is now retired.

The Surfside Tragedy Recalls South Florida’s Long Hold on
the Jewish Imagination and Reality
BY THANE ROSENBAUM
UNTIL A 13-STORY building
inexplicably collapsed in the
middle of the night, placing the
whereabouts and lives of 159
residents in doubt, few gave
Surfside, Florida, very much
thought before last week. The
14 JULY 8, 2021
town was, after all, a South
Florida misnomer. There’s no
surfing. The white caps on the
Atlantic Ocean never provide
enough tubular lift. The people
of Surfside skew older. Nearly
half its 6,000 residents are
Jewish, and of those, many are
Orthodox. You can call Surfside sleepy,
but even that wouldn’t describe
it. Nothing truly special had
ever happened there. Now, with
a tragedy so titanic — and still
unfolding — its name will become
synonymous with misery.

To the casual observer,
Surfside was a breakaway
township from its more widely
known neighbor, Miami Beach,
just to its south. Those over the
border on Miami Beach, and
in Bal Harbour, the village to
Surfside’s immediate north, for
many decades had good reason
to regard themselves as South
Florida’s very own Old City of
Jerusalem — a mixed enclave
with a major Jewish quarter, and
a bit more decadence.

Surfside didn’t have the
Art Deco Jazz Age sparkle or
swinger elegance that the Eden
Roc and Fontainebleau hotels
offered back in the 1950s into the
’70s. In Surfside, the Americana
was the swankiest hotel. It
once showcased a very young
Jackson 5, long before any Billie
Jean took notice of Michael. A
rare excitement, but the town’s
residents didn’t beg for more.

JEWISH EXPONENT
Surfside enjoyed the stillness —
on land and sea.

I know about Surfside. I grew
up on 74th Street on Miami
Beach. The horrific spectacle
that FEMA has now declared to
be a national emergency site is
on 87th Street. By the time the
Champlain Towers was built in
1981, I had long decamped for
college and then New York.

I frequently return to Miami
Beach, but mostly in my imagi-
nation. Many of my novels have
featured scenes with Miami
Beach as the backdrop. My last
one, “How Sweet It Is!”, selected
by the City of Miami Beach as its
Centennial Book, is a nostalgic
return to 1972 — a valentine,
I call it — when Miami Beach
was, oddly, the center of the
world. During
that summer,
Miami Beach hosted both the
Democratic and Republican
nominating conventions. Unlike
the infamous Democratic
National Convention in Chicago
in 1968, the Miami Beach police
somehow avoided clubbing
the heads of Vietnam War
protesters. Jackie Gleason, who no longer
had his TV variety show — once
filmed live on Miami Beach —
was palling around with his
buddy, Frank Sinatra, who had
recently retired for the first time.

You could find them drinking
See Rosenbaum, Page 23
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM