Weekend “Am Yisrael Chai” Commentaries

Eugene Kontorovich is a rock star in the international legal world. He was born in Ukraine, brought to the USA at three years old in 1978 before the fall of the Iron Curtain. He married, has four children and lives now primarily in the West Bank of Israel.

Kontorovich directs the international law department at the Kohelet Policy Forum, an Israeli conservative think tank.  He has been a law professor at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University since 2018.

Kontorovich has spent an enormous amount of time consulting and writing for state legislatures presenting legislation to penalize corporations and organizations promoting BDS efforts against Israel.

The following is his essay on the situation of Israel as it is in the moment.

These are the goals of your country under Joseph Biden.  Listen and read closely.  Anything else you hear is a lie.

Hamas’ grisly terror raid on Oct. 7 has proved to be the single most stunningly successful act in gaining support for the Palestinian cause—not among Israeli or American voters, of course, but among top Democratic policymakers, and their counterparts across the Western world. One might think that a campaign of unrepentant killing, torture, rape, and hostage-taking would be disqualifying for a national independence movement. But in Washington, Hamas’ ongoing crimes have resulted in much of the weight of the U.S. government being brought to bear on advancing the cause of Palestinian statehood, and its correlate, the punishment and demonization of the Jewish state.

and,

This past February, however, the administration let it all hang out. Without bothering to present any legal analysis, Secretary of State Blinken declared that Jewish communities in those areas that had been ethnically cleansed by Jordan after 1948 were illegal (“inconsistent with international law”), going further than even the Obama administration, which had used the lesser epithet “illegitimate.”

Last month, the administration indicated it might require that Israeli-made products from Judea and Samaria no longer be labeled as “Made in Israel.”

The green light from the White House has in turn given new life to efforts by the country’s thriving networks of billionaire-backed progressive NGOs to isolate and stigmatize the Jewish state. Two years ago, the so-called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement—a campaign by activists from a network of state-sponsored anti-Israel NGOs—was pronounced dead.

and this,

It bears noting here that the attraction of Western progressives to medieval violence is quite specific. The ISIS or al-Qaida variety, for instance, did not lead to calls among progressive elites to champion their political agendas or recognize their pseudo-states. Rather, this enthusiasm is reserved for specific perpetrators: Iran and the Palestinians.

this as well,

The flip side of this equation is even more obscene. Washington rewards Iranian and Palestinian terrorism under the moniker of “de-escalation.” That is to say, Iran and the Palestinians get to have their cake and eat it too: Their barbarism advances their agenda, and any attempted retaliation against them is condemned and constrained.

Which leads us to the heart of the matter, namely what Iran, Hezbollah, and Palestinian terror groups all have in common with each other and not with ISIS. By itself, the specific identity of the perpetrators of gruesome violence does not account for Western advocacy on their behalf. That is explained only by the specific identity of the victims: Jews. This is the common thread that ties together support for Palestinian barbarism abroad and for antisemitic mobs at home.

Read The Whole Damn Thing.