Questions About Israel and the Palestinians for John Legend

Singer John Legend recently accused the Jewish state of mistreating the Palestinian Arabs. A report on his views is here.

Legend, who tweeted “Palestinian Lives Matter” during the Israel-Hamas conflict in May, has made several claims in the past about Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians. When asked about his position on the Palestinian territories in Israel during a live podcast recording with Hasan in 2020, the “Ordinary People” singer said, “There should not be a whole group of people in a country, because of their nationality or religion, being held in open-air prisons, denied freedom of movement and having their land annexed by settlers … that’s just a human position.”

What “open-air prison” is he talking about? Gaza, where there has not been a single Israeli since 2005? Or the West Bank where, in Area A, the P.A. has complete control, in Area B it has complete control over domestic matters, and only in Area C is Israel responsible for both domestic and foreign matters. But even in Area C the Palestinians have managed – by flouting the laws — to build new, and expand old, settlements. It’s not land owned by Arabs that is being settled on and, in Legend’s incorrect phrase, “annexed” by Israel. That land is either “state and waste land” which, by the Mandate for Palestine, is expressly to be settled by Jews, or it is land that Jews have bought from Arabs. The notion that the Israelis are simply seizing land from Arabs and “annexing” it is noxious nonsense.

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Palestinians are not “denied freedom of movement” in either Gaza or Areas A and B in the West Bank. The reason for separate roads for Arabs and Jews in some parts — not all — of the West Bank, was made necessary for security reasons. Arabs on the side of roads, or traveling in cars themselves, were firing on Jews in cars, and it finally became necessary, to save lives, to build, in certain places in the West Bank, separate roads for Arabs and for Jews. As for checkpoints, which slow down, but do not prevent, freedom of movement, they are necessary to ensure that terrorists with weapons do not enter areas of Jewish settlement, or into Israel proper. Such checkpoints for security reasons are used as a matter of course all over the world to prevent terrorism. Anyone in the Western world who takes a plane, or tries to enter a government building, or a stadium, now has to pass through a security checkpoint.

In 2019, he [Legend] defended US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar against accusations of antisemitism and discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on HBO‘s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

Legend defended Ilhan Omar from charges of antisemitism; that is, without offering details, he simply denied she was antisemitic. Easily done. That’s a statement, not an argument. But ever since being elected, Omar has been obsessively attacking Israel, which she calls a colonial-settler state that practices apartheid, and has also denounced American Jewish organizations – AIPAC is her particular target — that, she claims, use their money to buy influence, and Congressional votes, for Israel. She apparently has no idea that AIPAC does not make political contributions to anyone. Omar has accused Israel of “unthinkable atrocities” in its war in Gaza, unaware that the IDF goes to heroic lengths to warn Palestinian civilians away from buildings that are soon to be attacked. The IDF makes telephone calls, and sends emails, when it can, to those in the targeted buildings, and also employs the “knock-on-the-roof” practice of dropping non-explosive or low-yield devices on the roofs of targeted civilian homes.

Here’s what John Legend could do: He could read the Qur’an and hadith, especially those many verses that call on Muslims to “fight” and to “kill” and to “smite at the necks of” and to “strike terror in the hearts of” the Infidels, and that tell them that they are the “best of peoples” (3:110) and non-Muslims the “most vile of created beings” (98:6). Here are a dozen verses he could start with: 2:191-193, 3:151, 4:89, 5:33, 8:12, 8:60, 9:5, 9:29, 47:4, 98:6. Then he might read the Mandate for Palestine, where he will find that the League of Nations in1922 set aside for the future Jewish National Home all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, even as it created other mandates on other territories for the creation of several Arab states. He might be surprised to discover, in Article 6 of the Mandate, that the Mandatory authority, Great Britain, was supposed to “facilitate Jewish immigration” and “to encourage close settlement by Jews on the land, including state and waste lands.”

Since John Legend is so interested in, and so free with his opinions about, the Arab-Israeli conflict, he should be willing to answer a half-dozen questions about the subject. To wit:

  1. Please explain why Arabs in Israel can write articles, make speeches, and engage in peaceful protest marches against their government, while Palestinian Arabs in both Hamas-ruled Gaza and in the P.A.-ruled parts of the West Bank, cannot do so against their rulers.
  2. Please explain why you think the assignment by the League of Nations of the land from the Jordan River to the sea to the future Jewish National Home, should now be ignored. What do you think about the other mandates set up by the League of Nations to create not one but several Arab states?
  3. There are 22 Arab states, with a total land area of 5,070,400 square miles, making them the most richly endowed people on earth. There is one Jewish state, with a total land area of 8,630 square miles. The Arabs thus possess approximately 600 times the territory of the Jews. Some of those Arab states also contain tens of trillions of dollars worth of oil and gas deposits; since 1973 they have already made, from oil sales, more than 30 trillion dollars.. There is, then, in many of those Arabs lands, both space for the settlement of “Palestinian refugees” and money to pay for them. Does John Legend have any comment?
  4. Please explain why there is no mention of the “Palestinian people” in any of the U.N. speeches by Arab leaders and diplomats, until after the Six-Day War.
  5. Please explain what the statement that heads the Hamas Charter, a quote from Hasan al-Banna, means: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
  6. Please give just one example of “apartheid” being practiced in the state of Israel today .

Perhaps Legend should be asked back to appear on the Bill Maher show, so that he might respond on air to those half-dozen questions. His answers should prove instructive, though not, I’m afraid, in the way he may be hoping.

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