Sizer Hertz

How myriad are the ways in which Israel-haters try to undermine the Jewish People's time-honoured associations with Eretz Israel by seeking to prove that there was a sovereign state of Palestine that the Jews stole from the, um, autonomous "Palestinians".

As I've showed several times on this blog a number of artefacts have been trotted out by the ill-willed and the ignorant to "prove" the absurd and shameful thesis: 17th, 18th and 19th century maps marked "Palestine", the "Palestinian" bird, coins, postage stamps, an orchestra, a newspaper, an airline, and a football team  ...

All this, despite the fact that so many of those developments were initiatives of the Yishuv, in other words the Jewish community of Mandate Palestine, and others, of course, of the Mandatory power, Great Britain, itself.

As a man of the cloth our old friend the ex-vicar of Virginia Water cannot be ignorant of the fact that the Romans imposed the name Palestine on Eretz Israel in order to drive home the fact that they had conquered the Jewish homeland and to eradicate the name Judea.

Still, he's posted about that airline (the above screenshot dates to 2014), and now he's endeavouring, it would appear, to recruit a one-liner by the great Joseph Herman Hertz (1872-1946), Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the UK and the Commonwealth from 1913 until his death, to undermine the Jews' claim to Eretz Israel.

Voilà!

It hurts, it must do, for a man (Sizer) who must know better to pretend to be quite that stupid! The reward must be in watching his followers lap it up.

Obviously, Hertz used the term "Palestine" because it was the term prevalent in his day.  He was not giving the nod to the anti-Zionist cause.  Far from it.

Sizer's trotted out the wrong man in Chief Rabbi Hertz, that's for sure.  As ably and succinctly put here:

 'Whilst many in the Orthodox world stood aloof from Zionism, Hertz was a robust champion of the cause. In answer to leaders of the organized community who were opposed, Hertz brought the prestige of his office to bear on the side of Zionism.

On May 28, 1917 he wrote a letter to The Times in which he rejected the notion that the recent attack in the newspaper on Zionism by Claude Montefiore of the Anglo-Jewish Association and David Alexander of the Board of Deputies reflected “the views held by Anglo-Jewry as a whole or by the Jewries of the overseas dominions.”

On October 6, 1917 the War Cabinet led by Prime Minister David Lloyd George decided to send out the ‎draft of a planned government statement about a Jewish homeland in Palestine to eight Jews—four anti-Zionists and four Zionists—for ‎comment.

Chief Rabbi Hertz, along with Lord Walter Rothschild and Zionist statesmen Nahum Sokolow and Chaim Weizmann all submitted supporting letters. ‎

Hertz was associated with the Mizrachi Orthodox stream of Zionism which saw the return of the Jewish people to Palestine as part of a Divine plan. In worldly affairs he criticized the British Government’s Mandatory policies as a reversal of the spirit of the Balfour Declaration.

A frequent visitor to Palestine, Hertz took part in the 1925 opening of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Mount Scopus. He went on to serve on the university’s Board of Governors.'

And lest the CEO of the so-called Peacemaker Trust tries to claim that he stands for the Two State Solution, he doesn't, as certain posts of his I've drawn attention to in the past, and this current post, show. 

This, by the way, is not the first article from the antisemitic Mondoweiss site to which our old friend has linked, and it's already not his last.