Rabbi Boteach: US Jewry Doesn’t Do Enough to Protect Israel
October 4, 2015
The United Nation’s inordinate focus on Israel “is not just a bias, it’s an obsession,” according to prominent US Rabbi Shmuley Boteach – and American Jews are not doing enough to fight anti-Israel bias.
Speaking to Arutz Sheva last Thursday following Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech to the UN General Assembly, Rabbi Boteach praised Netanyahu’s address, saying that while the Israeli PM always “delivers,” this time was more powerful than ever.
“The most powerful thing he did was what he didn’t say… it was that moment of silence when he stared down the nations of the world for their silence on yet another genocidal threat against the Jewish people 70 years after the Holocaust.”
But despite that threat, Rabbi Boteach accused American Jewry of not doing enough to support Israel.
“Does American Jewry do enough to protect Israel? No, of course not.
“If American Jewry did enough then the Iran deal would not have passed – we were not united against the Iran deal,” he asserted.
“We also were not prepared to put our relationships with powerful politicians on the line to tell them that this is the foreign policy vote of their lifetime, that this is the foreign policy vote that will determine the future security of the United States and directly of Israel.”
Most US Jews did oppose the deal, and major Jewish organizations did “advertise against it” while individual Jewish approached their congressmen, he acknowledged – but Boteach accused them of falling short.
“We didn’t say to them: this is the whole ballgame, this is it… This is Iran getting a nuclear bomb, this is it – and if you’re not with us now we have to question whether you are truly with us. You profess friendship, but this is the hole ballgame!”
“President Obama himself said that this will give them… by the end of the deal, a near-zero breakout time,” he continued.
Boteach blamed what he saw as a somewhat lackluster opposition on “rampant assimilation rates” and the erosion of Jewish identity in America.
“What we face as the Jewish people is a two-pronged war: We face a physical threat in the Middle East from Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Iran… and then we face an assimilation threat, a very different kind of threat here in the West.
“One is where Jews are rejected, and Iran wants to annihilate Israel; the other one is that Jews are so accepted that they can lose their identitiy and assimilate into oblivion,” he warned.
“Our survival is at stake.”
Watch the video above for the full interview.
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