By: Guest blogger, Walter Ruby
This is to raise my voice as an American and a Jew who loves both Israelis and Palestinians in protest against the Trump Administration's cruel and deeply inhumane policies cutting off all U.S. aid to a variety of UN and US programs that for decades have provided support to Palestinian civilians; including stripping all US support for UNRWA; cutting off aid to East Jerusalem hospitals that serve Palestinians throughout the West Bank and Gaza, and even co-existence programs for Palestinians and Israelis.
All of this is a transparent effort by chief U.S. Middle East negotiator and thuggish son-in-law of the President Jared Kushner to cause such pain to Palestinian men, women and children that it will force the P.A., which broke off its involvement in his utterly one-sided "peace" plan after the Trump Administration recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, to come back to the table and accept whatever scraps Kushner may throw their way. Sitting on his regal throne in the White House and atop 666 5th Avenue; the arrogant and entitled first son-in-law/real estate developer obviously cannot hear the anguished cries of Palestinian children suffering in Gaza; he barely seems to consider them human.
The sheer inhumanity of Kushner's strategy is Incredibly sad for someone whose own family was decimated in the Holocaust. No, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the Holocaust and Gaza is not Auschwitz. Yet speaking as someone whose mother escaped Germany in 1938 and barely managed to reach safety in America because of anti-Semitic U.S. policies at the time, I am sickened by the irony that a billionaire grandchild of Holocaust survivors now sits atop the corridors of power in Washington and takes health care and education away from desperately poor Palestinian children so as to bend Palestinian leaders to his will.
This is not Jewish morality, which says that if you save one life, you save the world. Kushner does the very opposite. I hope rabbis will call Kushner out on Yom Kippur and the maximum number of Americans—Jews and non-Jews alike—will stand up and say, "Not In Our Name."
Walter Ruby, a longtime reporter and commentator for American Jewish and Israeli newspapers, serves as Coordinator of JAMAAT (Jews, Muslims and Allies Acting Together of Washington DC).
