Showing there are many opinions in Israel and abroad about its West Bank policy, American Jewish comedians 38-year-old Seth Rogen and 56-year-old Marc Maron got into it over the West Bank. Rogen ruffled the government’s feathers saying its polices “doesn’t make sense,” expressing opposition to 70-year-old Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of settlement building in the Palestinian-controlled West Bank, a territory with biblical significance to many Jews. Palestinians, led by 84-year-old Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, want the entire West Bank for a future Palestinian state that runs from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Rogen, like many progressive American Jews, don’t know the history, or for that part care much about it. They sympathize with Palestinians aspirations for their own independent state.
Rogen or Maron may not know that Israel seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan as spoils of the 1967 Six Day War, where some six Arab countries tried to wipe Israel off the map, take back all the land, from the British Mandate of Palestine ceded to Jews in 1948, fighting a bloody war of Independence before declaring a state May 14, 1948. Whatever historians say about the Six Day War, Israel did not return the spoils, including Jordan’s West Bank and East Jerusalem, Egypt’s Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights. Israel made a peace deal with Egypt in 1979, returning the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for a treaty. Israel gave back the Gaza Strip Sept. 22, 2005, but retained the West Bank and Golan Heights. Since the Six Day War, Israel had fought several wars and terrorist uprisings, prompting Netanyahu to place high priority on Israel’s national security.
When Rogen says Israel’s West Bank policy “doesn’t make sense,” it’s because he not political or defense savvy about Israel’s national security needs. “What Seth Rogen said is par for the course among our generation and the Israeli government has to wake up and see that their actions have consequences,” said Yonah Lieberan, spokesman for If Not Now, an American Jewish Organization, like J-Street, opposed to Israeli West Bank “occupation.” But what Palestinian and progressive groups don’t get is that Israel’s national security no longer permits Israel to give away it’s buffer zones like the West Bank and Golan Heights. Back in 1967, the United Nations and Palestinian groups demanded, after fighting a war of annihilation against Israel, they return to the pre-1967 borders. Egypt, with former President Jimmy Carter, found a way to an Israeli-Egypt peace treaty in 1979.
When Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO] founder Yasser Arafat ruled Palestinians, he had several chances to make peace with Israel, all of which failed because he couldn’t stop militants from waging war against Israel. Since 2007, Palestine has been divided between Hamas controlling the Gaza Strip and Abbas controlling the West Bank. Rogen and other American liberals don’t understand that half the Palestinian population in Gaza are 100% committed to Israel’s destruction. They consider themselves at war with Israel, routinely telling their population they will one day conquer the Jewish State. “You don’t keep all your Jews in one basket. I don’t understand why they did that. I makes no sense whatsoever,” Rogen said, making a joke but essentially questioning why the state of Israel. Rogen apparently doesn’t remember the Nazi Germany Holocaust, exterminating 6 million Jews.
Rogen’s comments were innocuous enough but raised a flurry of criticism and other social media platforms. “You don’t keep something you’re trying to preserve all in one place especially when that place had proven to be pretty volatile. I’m trying to keep all these things safe. I ‘m going to put them in my blender and hope that that’s the best place to, that’ll do it,” Rogen said. Rogen knows that Israel has less than one-half the world’s Jewish population, not realizing Jew’s biblical attachment to the land of their ancestors. Rogen took immediate flack from Issac Herzog, head of the nonprofit Jewish Agency. “I told him that many Israelis and Jews around the world were personally hurt by his statement, which implies the denial of Israel’s right to exist,” Herzog. Herzog and other political types, need to take a chill pill, Rogen meant no offense, certainly not that Israel shouldn’t exist.
Rogen was forced by his mother, Sandy Belogus, who met her husband Mark Rogen on an Israeli Kibbutz, told Seth to clarify his position. “I don’t want Jews to think that I don’t think Israel should exist. And I understand how they could have been led to think that,” Rogen said. Jews in Israel and in the diaspora around the world, have strong opinions about the best approach for peace. Many progressives in Israel and abroad don’t like the security-minded policies of Netanyahu and his government coalition that think of security first, before philosophical debates. Shmuel Rosner, as senior policy fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, said Israel should not change its “security and foreign polices” based on outside influence. Even Netanyahu paused his campaign promise to annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank, knowing the outrage expressed around the world to that plan.
