The Nerve of ‘Judaizing’ Neighborhoods

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights notes that every person has a right to own property. It would appear that such right is very limited for Jews, as they are most unwelcome in certain neighborhoods. This Jew-hatred is found in both White and Black neighborhoods, and seemingly endorsed by several liberal politicians and media outlets as well as the United Nations.

In the Jewish Holy Land

For over 1,000 years, Jews have been expelled from their homes and lands and pushed into ghettos in scores of countries. The situation continues today with politicians and media question why Jews would even live in certain places.

In June 2014, BBC’s Nicky Campbell questioned why three Jewish teenagers were hitchhiking in the West Bank, only to get themselves kidnapped and killed. “Palestinians would say perhaps these people were in the West Bank illegally.” His logic was that Jews cannot live in certain places, so they only have only themselves to blame when they get killed.
In October 2014, the Obama Administration’s Josh Earnest said “The US condemns the recent occupation of residential buildings in the neighborhood of Silwan by people whose agenda provokes tensions.” The message is clear: Jews buying homes and living in eastern Jerusalem is terrible because the Jews are stirring tensions, not because Arabs are consumed with Jew hatred.
The New York Times described these Israeli purchases of homes in the Silwan neighborhood of Jerusalem in the same language Hitler used to describe Jews as nefarious schemers: “In the dark of night, under the protection of Israeli security forces, Jewish settlers took possession of some 25 housing units in six locations around the Silwan neighborhood of East Jerusalem… Many of the properties had been rented out, but they were strangely empty when the settlers arrived… Through a multimillion-dollar series of complex and shadowy transactions spanning several years, Elad engineered the largest private settlement initiative in decades.” The Jews must have been ding something illegal; they have no real rights to buy these homes.
A few days later in October 2014 the New York Times portrayed the residents of Silwan as peaceful Arabs who were set upon by crazy Israelis who moved next door: “An influx of right-wing Jewish settlers who have acquired property in the area in recent years have made the neighborhood a flash point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The Jews were the extremists and caused violence, not the other way around.
The sentiment of the NY Times would continue through articles and editorials and get more and more direct that the Jews are 100% to blame for buying homes where they shouldn’t. In February 2015, Nicholas Kristof wrote “nibbling of Arab land is just plain wrong.” The physical land for the alt-left is permanently Arab and no one but an Arab should ever live there. It’s the exact language of the KKK stating that no Black person should live in a White neighborhood or Muslims and Latinos move to a White country. It is also directly in contrast in international law in the Palestine Mandate that specifically stated that “No person shall be excluded from Palestine on the sole ground of his religious belief.”
In speech-after-speech, leaders of the Palestinian Authority continue to claim that Israel is trying to “Judaize” Jerusalem, as if Jerusalem hasn’t had a majority Jewish population for 150 years.
The United Nations has echoed the charge and demanded that Israel not change the “demographics or character” of Jerusalem.
By September 2015, the liberal media only began calling the Jewish Temple Mount the “al Aqsa Compound” in its articles. When using the term “Temple Mount,” it would add qualifiers like “Jews call it…” or “Jews believe that their ancient Temple stood there.” This was a new standardization, much like the term “West Bank” is the accepted norm for the media, while “Judea and Samaria” are terms that only right-wing Jews use. The media got the lesson plan that the land is Arab and Jews are colonial invaders.
And in time for Christmas 2015, The New York Times Roger Cohen wrote that Jews living in Judea and Samaria “makes violence inevitable,” not because of Arab antisemitism, but because of “Messianic Zionism.“

Liberals understood Arab sentiment and it wasn’t antisemitism. The violence was purely the Jews fault for living in places which shouldn’t have Jews. Arabs don’t want to kill Jews, they just want them to get the hell out of their town.

It was therefore no surprise when Obama let United Nations Security Council pass Resolution 2334 in December 2016 declaring that it is indeed illegal for Israeli Jews to live in the eastern part of the Jewish holy land.

In America’s Black and White Communities

There’s one country other than Israel with over 5 million Jews, but the United States has over 300 million people, making the Jews a very small minority, rather than the ruling majority. Still, their small number is too big a presence for many.

Over the past decade, many Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn were being priced out of their neighborhood so they sought cheaper housing in Jersey City, NJ. The New York Times covered the trend in August 2017 and remarked how Black residents objected to these newcomers, not because of antisemitism, but because the Jews were “pushy” and “conservative” and involved in “illegal” activities.
The NY Times would not write about the White community of Mahwah, NJ which ripped down a Jewish eruv that facilitates more Orthodox Jews to move into the neighborhood in June 2017. The online petition with over 1,000 signatures contained some of the most vile Jew-hatred comments including “Our town is such a great place and if these things move in they will ruin it. they think they can do whatever the hell they want and well be known as a dirty town if they move in. Please keep them out to maintain the quality of Mahwah” and “They are clearly trying to annex land like they’ve been doing in Occupied Palestine. Look up the satanic verses of the Talmud and tell me what you see.” Pure alt-Right Jew-hatred.
In May and June 2019, the progressive mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio could only blame Donald Trump and the alt-right for the spike in attacks against Jews, even when a disproportionate number of the attackers were Black people, saying “The forces of white supremacy have been unleashed and … those are profoundly anti-Semitic forces,” and “I think the ideological movement that is anti-Semitic is the right-wing movement,… I want to be very, very clear, the violent threat, the threat that is ideological is very much from the right.”
In April 2019, leaders of the Black community said that the “white invasion is an ‘insidious onslaught’ to African-American life” and something must be done to “stop the occupation.” Intersectional language brought by BlackLiveMatter as part of its August 2016 platform, connecting Jews in Jersey to Jews in Jerusalem. Keep ’em out.
After Jews were slaughtered by two Black people in Jersey City in December 2019, several leaders of the Black community were clear that they felt the killers were only REacting as a form of self defense: “Black homeowners were threatened, intimidated, and harassed by I WANT TO BUY YOUR HOUSE brutes of the jewish community.”

In the United States, Black and White communities are trying to keep Jews out of their neighborhoods. They see these newcomers as “invaders” threatening their way of life, whether in “inner-city neighborhoods that have been culturally and racially defined as black communities” or “I live in Mahwah and want to preserve the community as it is.”

In 1900, there were roughly 50 countries with over 25,000 Jews. Today, that number stands at just 17 countries, as antisemitism decimated Jews throughout Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East. The remnant principally lives in just two countries, Israel and the United States, home to over 80% of world Jewry. And many people object to their presence in those locations as well.

The hatred and objection to Jews living somewhere is not new. However, the various forms of absolution granted to these anti-Semites from both the left and right are alarming and must be condemned as unambiguously as the sentiment itself.

Related First.One.Through articles:

Time to Define Banning Jews From Living Somewhere as Antisemitic

The New York Times All Out Assault on Jewish Jerusalem

Your Father’s Anti-Semitism

The Remarkable Tel Jerusalem

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New York Times Lies about the Gentleness of Zionism

Criticizing Muslim Antisemitism is Not Islamophobia

Between Right-Wing and Left-Wing Antisemitism

Ramifications of Ignoring American Antisemitism

The War Against Israel and Jewish Civilians

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