Defense doesn’t win ball games or wars

Portnoy’s children and the ANC

By Allen Menkin, MD, Project Manager, CAMERA’s Naples Partnership of Christians and Jews

In the mid-20th century, Europe was in ashes; Israel was a collection of a million-and-a-half refugees on a sandbar in the eastern Mediterranean and Newark’s Weequahic section was a box of neuroses and contradictions celebrated by Phillip Roth in “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “Goodbye, Columbus.”

Gold star mothers wept for dead sons in the women’s balcony of the shul on Avon Avenue, and the counterman hand slicing belly lox at Tabachnick’s had numbers tattooed on his wrist, but shoppers scurrying to get home before Shabbos were triple parked in front of Lehrhoff’s bakery on Chancellor Avenue. The maternity ward at Beth Israel Hospital was full; the economy was booming; the suburbs were beckoning; and the forbidden fruit of assimilation dangled within reach.

But history and custom conspired to make us martyrs not warriors, and a debilitating self-image of Jews as passive victims gripped the residents of Portnoyland. That changed when the sandbar Jews attacked and thrashed the Soviet Union’s Arab proxies in 1967. The Six-Day War redefined the State of Israel and changed the way we saw ourselves.

In hindsight, the 1973 Yom Kippur War may have been even more consequential. Israel rallied from the brink of defeat to trap the Egyptian Third Army, gain the Golan Heights, and eventually sign a formal peace treaty with Anwar Sadat. But it required a massive American rescue and the “defeated” Arabs realized that they could bloody the Zionist’s nose and survive to fight another day.

In the war’s wake, a humiliated Leonid Brezhnev deployed a sophisticated propaganda campaign, centered on ingrained Soviet antizionism, to turn the newly liberated nations of Africa and Asia against America and Israel. The campaign presaged the radical left’s lexicon of apartheid, settler colonialism, wokism and intersectionality, and it succeeded brilliantly. Israel was booted out of Africa, the U.N. General Assembly became a tool of a nonaligned/ Soviet majority, and Zionism was declared racism.

Apartheid South Africa was particularly fertile ground and leaders of its African National Congress Party (ANC) were groomed to champion Palestinian terrorism and lead the charge against Israel’s legitimacy, which they have enthusiastically done for decades. Today, South Africa cannot meet the basic needs of its citizens, and the ANC uses Israel as a whipping boy to draw attention from its chronic corruption and mismanagement. It has much to answer for.

Portnoy’s children left Newark and shed the victim complex but kept a defensive mindset. Defense does not win ball games or wars, and we are at war. We need to go on offense. For a start, we need to call out our enemies and hold them accountable for their crimes. CAMERA has been doing that every day since 1982.

On Nov. 18, the Naples Partnership of Christians and Jews will present a conference featuring Rev. Malcolm Hedding.

Hedding was an outspoken opponent of apartheid and an expert on the ANC’s lawfare against Israel. He is one of today’s most articulate teachers on Christian Zionism, an internationally recognized speaker on Israel and the church, and a leading theologian in the Christian Zionist world.