A Critic of Israel Accidentally Makes a Case for Zionism

Well, the British doctor, Rahmeh Aladwan, whose Holocaust denial, support of Hamas, and characterization of Jews as “the most despicable people on earth” got her suspended for a while from practicing medicine, has nailed us good this time.A British court previously heard that, last summer, Dr. Aladwan allegedly wrote, “I don’t condemn Hamas. I don’t condemn October 7,” alongside “I condemn the existence of Israel.” And that, last December, she posted, “Free the world from Jewish supremacy.”Near the anniversary of the October 7 attack, she allegedly posted an image of a bulldozer accompanied by text reading, “Glory to the Palestinian resistance.” Recently, however, she leveled an accusation about Jews that simply can’t be denied.“Jews,” she posted on X, “have been reciting the zionist [sic] Amidah prayer for 2400 years. It was made up by rabbis. They pray it 3 times a day.”We must stand guilty as charged. The Amidah is the central prayer of every Jewish service and, indeed, is recited thrice daily by observant Jews. As Dr. Aladwan explains, it does repeatedly reference the Holy Land as the divine Jewish inheritance.The prayer consists of nineteen blessings, the tenth asking God to gather together Jewish exiles “from the four corners of the earth.” The fourteenth concerns the rebuilding of Jerusalem; and the seventeenth pines for the return of the “divine presence to Zion.” The Amidah ends with an expression of gratitude for the daily miracles that are our lives and for a request that God bless the Jews “with peace.”Yes, we Jews have been praying for all that and more for centuries, actually millennia, since the Amidah dates back to the fifth century before the Common Era. No way we can wiggle out of the good doctor’s accusation here.What’s more, it’s worse. After meals including bread, one of the main blessings that comprise the grace after meals has the Holy City as its subject, beginning with a reference to “Jerusalem Your city” and ending with “Who in His mercy builds Jerusalem.” The shortened form of the grace when bread has not been consumed also — horrors — references Zion and includes a plea to God to “bring us up into [the land] and gladden us in its rebuilding.”Please, dear reader, don’t tell Ms. Aladwan.Yet, as her constant goal is the destruction of the Jewish state, her recent cri de coeur is something of an embarrassing self-own. Because the evidence she has procured, like that of which she seems unaware, only proves the antiquity of the Jewish connection to the land currently called Israel and how that connection today remains as strong as ever.

A Critic of Israel Accidentally Makes a Case for Zionism

A Critic of Israel Accidentally Makes a Case for Zionism

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