The Planned “Anti-Breakfast for Israel” Demonstration against Magen David Adom Highlights Hatred, False Narratives, and Jewish Self-Loathing

May 8, 2019 by Susan Rosenbluth

On Sunday, May 19, a fundraising breakfast for Magen David Adom (MDA), Israel’s national emergency medical, disaster, ambulance, and blood bank service, will be held to honor the organization which, since its beginning in the pre-state days of 1930, has provided aid to all residents of the area, Jews, of course, but also Arabs, including Muslims, Druze, and Christians.

It has, therefore, been perplexing to some MDA supporters that Teaneck resident Richard A. Siegel has planned what he and his organization, “Deir Yassin Remembered,” are calling an “Anti-Breakfast for Israel” protest.

Teaneck police say Mr. Siegel and his like-minded protestors have applied for a permit and, thus, have a right to hold their demonstration, however, they will be kept at a distance from Congregation Beth Sholom, where the MDA breakfast will be held from 11am-1pm.

Antisemitism Masquerading as Anti-Zionism

On his website and Facebook pages, Mr. Siegel, who identifies as a “pianist, vocalist, songwriter, peace activist, writer, musical director, and bandleader,” spouts rhetoric typical of antisemitism-masquerading-as-anti-Zionism, however he also makes much of the fact that he is Jewish. “When do we Jews notice that Israel is insane?” reads the placard he holds on his website.

His barely veiled antisemitic comments, such as calling the MDA Breakfast “an event supporting the racist war-mongering apartheid Jewish state” which he says “is not relevant to Teaneck” or smearing the town’s Zionist and Modern-Orthodox communities for maintaining a “sense of entitlement” and trying “to make Teaneck into a Jewish-Zionist town,” have fooled no one.

“He calls Deir Yassin Remembered ‘a human rights organization,’ but they have been deemed a hate group by others,” said Elie Y. Katz, a local businessman who serves as Teaneck’s Deputy Mayor. Mr. Katz and his wife, Esther, are hosting the MDA breakfast in honor of Mrs. Katz’s father.

Hate Group

In fact, Deir Yassin Remembered has been classified as “an active Holocaust-denial hate group” even by organizations and individuals who are not friendly to Israel, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center in the United States and British politician Jeremy Corbyn. A spin-off of the group is called “Righteous Jews,” a play on the phrase “righteous gentiles,” for Jews, like Mr. Siegel, who turn against Israel.

Deir Yassin Remembered has won notoriety for sympathizing with Nazi Germany and its proponents. The group campaigned for the release from prison and exoneration of Ernst Zundel, a German neo-Nazi who was jailed in Canada for publishing literature “likely to incite hatred against an identifiable group” as well as in his native Germany for “inciting racial hatred.”

Mr. Siegel is not the only Jew associated with Der Yassin Remembered. Henry Herskovitz of Ann Arbor is a member of the group’s board of advisers. The group has run billboards that read “America First Not Israel.”

False Narrative

Even Der Yassin Remembered’s ostensible raison d’etre is replete with false narratives. While the group holds to the story that, in 1948, the “peaceful” Palestinian-Arab village of Deir Yassin was attacked by armed Israeli soldiers and “more than 100 men, women, and children were systematically murdered,” scholars such as Professor Eliezer Tauber, a former dean of Bar-Ilan University and an expert on the emergence of Arab nationalism, the formation of the Arab states, and the early phases of the Arab-Israeli conflict, beg to differ.

“Deir Yassin is one of the founding myths of the Palestinian narrative, according to which Israelis murdered 254 people and committed rapes and other gender-oriented atrocities in a peaceful 1948 Palestinian village. For the past five years, I have carried out an in-depth research into the affair, learned to know the village, who lived there and where, their names, and above all, the exact circumstances of death of each of the people killed there. The results were astounding, but clear. There was no massacre in Deir Yassin. No rapes. Lots of unfounded Palestinian propaganda,” said Dr. Tauber, author of “The Massacre That Never Was: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.”

He found that Deir Yassin was not at all the peaceful village many later claimed it to be. Rather, he said, it was a fortified town with dozens of armed combatants. Its relations with the adjacent Jewish neighborhoods were, to say the very least, “troubled,” and the Jews believed it endangered the only road from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.

A Battle, Not a Massacre

In April 1948, after giving the Arab villagers advance warning to evacuate (obeyed by 700 people), Israeli forces attacked Deir Yassin. During the ten-hour battle that ensued, the Israelis took an additional 200 Arabs as prisoners and then safely released them in Arab Jerusalem.

The Deir Yassin Remembered website seems to agree, claiming that, after the battle, “53 orphaned children were literally dumped along the wall of the Old City,” from where they were brought to an orphanage.

An Arab survivor of the battle later testified that he believed “most of those who were killed were among the fighters and the women and children who helped the fighters.”

In his research, Dr. Tauber found that the testimonies of the Jewish attackers, on the one hand, and the Arab survivors, on the other, were “surprisingly similar and, at times, almost identical.”

Both Dr. Tauber and Deir Yassin Remembered concur that, after the battle ended, the killing stopped. They disagree, however, on the number and status of the casualties. Dr. Tauber found that of the 101 Arabs who were killed, a quarter were active combatants “and most of the rest in combat conditions.”

The Jews also suffered casualties.

Manufactured Catastrophe

According to Dr. Tauber, after the battle, Dr. Hussein Khalidi, the senior Arab authority in 1948 Jerusalem, determined to use Deir Yassin for “the utmost propaganda possible because the Arab countries apparently are not interested in assisting us, and we are facing a catastrophe.”

Dr. Khalidi was quoted as saying, “So we are forced to give a picture, not what is actually happening, but we had to exaggerate.”

Citing another Arab survivor of Deir Yassin, Dr. Tauber found that it was Dr. Khalidi “who caused the catastrophe.”

“Instead of working in our favor, the propaganda worked in favor of the Jews. Whole villages and towns fled because of what they heard had happened in Deir Yassin,” the Arab survivor said.

Modern Reverberations

Dr. Tauber understands that while the Palestinian-Arab leadership intended to exploit the affair to lay pressure on the Arab states to send their armies to Palestine to fight the Jews, “that plan boomeranged.”

“Following the rule that women’s honor comes before land, the moment the Palestinians heard about rapes they started to leave,” said Dr. Tauber. “Israelis and Palestinians believe in two myths about the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. The Israelis claim that the Palestinians followed their leaders’ exhortations to evacuate their homes temporarily and then return with the victorious Arab armies, but that is not what spurred Palestinians to leave. The Palestinians claim that the Israelis expelled them in 1948, but this was not what drove the departure. The true story of the 1948 Palestinian exodus was a flight mainly motivated by panic over a massacre that never happened.”

The effects reverberate to this day with people such as Mr. Siegel and his group who want to build a memorial to commemorate Deir Yassin in a location overlooking the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.

“The equation recurs in their writings, which argue that describing the massacre as ‘false, exaggerated, or in dispute,’ is tantamount to Holocaust revisionism. My research of the affair puts to rest any serious questioning of whether there was or was not a massacre at Deir Yassin. There was not,” said Dr. Tauber.

Jewish Self-Hate

In Teaneck, Mr. Katz, the MDA breakfast host, did not question Mr. Siegel’s right to free speech, however, he said, he finds his rhetoric, especially the lyrics of his song, “In Palestine” abhorrent. In his song, Mr. Siegel bemoans that “the children are dying in Palestine,” but minimizes Jewish-Israelis’ needs for security in a land of their own mostly because Israel has managed to keep Israeli deaths to a minimum.

“There’s nothing new about Jewish self-hate,” said Mr. Katz.

Israeli attorney Uri Silber calls this phenomenon “the Jew flu,” which he defines as “the strange illness of Jewish antisemitism and its Jewish anti- and post-Zionist mutations, affecting a small but very vociferous minority of Jews.”

“Those infected with the virus exaggerate Israeli sins real or imagined, while excusing or rationalizing Palestinian-Arab antisemitism and outrages against Jews,” said Mr. Silber.

“Nice Muslim Lap-Dog”

At the MDA breakfast, notable speakers will include Israel’s former consul-general in New York, Ido Aharoni; Magen David Adom’s head of terrorism-response training, Guy Caspi; and Sarri Singer, an American survivor of a Palestinian suicide-bomber bus terrorist attack.

Opening remarks will be given by Teaneck Mayor Mohammed Hameeduddin, the first Muslim-American to be elected head of a city in Bergen County. Mr. Hameeduddin, who has been credited with working to help cement relations between the Jewish and Muslim communities, said he is proud to be speaking for MDA which, he said, performs its “lifesaving work every day in Israel.”

Mr. Hameeduddin’s efforts to unify Teaneck’s very disparate communities did not impress Mr. Siegel, who called the mayor “a nice Muslim lap-dog for your Zionist-Jewish colleagues on the town council.” Mr. Siegel said the mayor is “making enemies everywhere else.”

“Jewish Supremacists”

Mr. Siegel accused Mr. Hameeduddin of “addressing a group of people who are actively promoting the ethnic cleansing of a Muslim majority population,” something, he said “most Muslims would find abhorrent.”

Mr. Siegel castigated Mr. Hameeduddin for speaking this past March at an interfaith prayer vigil for peace and healing in Teaneck’s Dar-ul-Islah mosque after 50 Muslims were killed in a terror attack in Christ Church, New Zealand.

“A lot of Muslims, and a lot of decent people of all faiths, are wondering what you’re doing speaking at a vigil for 50 Muslim victims of white supremacist terrorism, when you’re also speaking at an event which celebrates Jewish supremacist terrorism at a Muslim majority population, with loss of life spanning over seven decades and far exceeding the death toll in New Zealand. I guess Muslims’ lives matter when white supremacist terrorists kill them, but not when Jewish supremacist terrorists do,” he said.

Just Stop the Missiles

On his Facebook page, Mr. Siegel features a video of a crying woman ostensibly from Gaza who wails for the camera: “I just want to show you what pain looks like because Israel is killing us, killing our children. They’re killing Gaza, and nobody is making them stop.” She ends her video with the plea, “Make them stop.”

Mr. Katz is certain Mr. Siegel and Deir Yassin Remembered will not keep those who want to support MDA away from the event. Information, including registration, can be found on the website, afmda.org/breakfast2019, or by contacting Emily Posner at eposner@afmda.org or 646-388-7504. “How come neither Siegel nor any of those who approve of the video, including Mohammed Sameer, Ozan Nedimi, Ahmad Abu Swereh, Saeed Sarwar, and Shereen Nasrallah, suggest that the violence in Gaza might cease if Hamas and other Islamist terrorists just stop throwing missiles at Israel?” said Mr. Katz.