Twisting the law of return: Messianic 'rabbi' establishes law firm to help Messianics immigrate to Israel
The former 'spiritual leader' of the largest messianic congregation in the United States has immigrated to Israel and opened a law firm (as a 'foreign lawyer,' which means he doesn't have to be admitted to the bar here) in Petach Tikva to
help Messianic 'Jews' to immigrate to Israel under the law of return.
Infamous
U.S. Christian leader "rabbi "Jamie Cowen, who managed to make aliyah
in 2011, has changed his name to Cohen and established the messianic law
firm Cohen, Pex and Brosh, with its main branch in Petach Tikvah.
As mentioned, as of this writing, none of Cowen's "messianic" background information appears on attorney Jamie Cohen's profile, as seen on his firm's website (although there is mention of his studies at a Catholic University and school of theology).
What is featured prominently in the law firm's section under Areas of Practice is "Immigration to Israel":
"All issues of immigration to Israel: Aliyah according to the Law of Return – 1950. Permanent residency. Temporary Residency. Work Visas. Student visas. Tourist visas. Volunteer visas. Clergy visas. International Refugee Law according to the UN convention (Asylum seekers)."
This is of major concern to Jews worldwide but especially in Israel. A number of evangelical/messianic lawyers in Israel have put interpreting the Law of Return to favor messianic Christian aliyah at the top of their agenda, and they are making inroads. In fact, another Israeli messianic law office, the Jerusalem Institute of Justice (JIJ), has recently issued pro-bono advice, which is being widely disseminated online and in email, geared for the throngs of believing Christians who want to make Aliyah. This will be the subject of JewishIsrael’s next report.
Read the whole thing.
A few comments: First, I have nothing against Christians. I have nothing against Christians supporting Israel. I have written dozens of posts defending Christians from persecution. I have a lot against Christians who try to proselytize Jews.
Second, the law of return is meant to facilitate
Jewish immigration to Israel - not anyone else's. After all, this is (supposed to be) the only Jewish state in the world. 40 years ago, in what might have been the last chance to enact a specific definition in the law of return of 'Who is a Jew,' the National Religious Party (forerunner of today's 'Jewish Home') asked Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik zt"l (may the memory of the righteous be a blessing) whether they should insist on adding the word '
k'halacha' to the law of return as a condition to their entering Yitzchak Rabin's first government. He told them that they should not enter the government without that condition. They ignored him (as a teenager growing up in Boston, the story got around quite quickly...). As a result, the law is ambiguous about who is allowed to immigrate to Israel under the law of return, and we are now paying the price (isn't it ironic that even an Orthodox convert to Judaism has to jump through hoops to immigrate here, but Messianic Christians are allowed to immigrate under the law of return?). This is an illustration of why the Haredim argue that you have to listen to your rabbis....
Third, as to my comment about the 'foreign lawyer' designation: For years, lawyers have been pressing the organized bar to allow us to partner with foreign lawyers. Within the last year, the bar, in its infinite wisdom, has allowed foreign lawyers who are not admitted to the bar here to hold themselves out as lawyers. Just like Cowen is doing. Israeli lawyers, on the other hand, are still forbidden to share their fees with 'non-lawyers,' with term lawyer being defined as - you guessed it - anyone who is admitted to the Israeli bar.
What could go wrong?
Labels: aliya, Christians, Israel Bar Association, Jewish Home party, Jewish immigration, Law of Return, Messianics, National Religious, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveichik
If there were no Jews in Israel, there would be no Arabs
Here's a brilliant article by George Gilder that explains how the only reason that there are Arabs in Israel is
because there are Jews.
AS LOWDERMILK recounted in his book, in the 21 years between 1921 and 1942, the Jews increased the number of enterprises four-fold, the number of jobs more than ten-fold, and total invested capital from a few hundred thousand dollars to the equivalent of $70 million in 1942 dollars. Particularly significant in Lowdermilk's view were the purchases of large expanses of unused Arab land by Jewish settlers, many of whom had earned the necessary funds by their own hard work on the arid soils. On most occasions, the settlers bought only a small proportion of an individual Arab's holding and paid three or four times what similar plots sold for in Syria (and far more even than in Southern California). Thus the Jewish purchases provided capital for Arab farms, allowing a dramatic expansion of their production. "In cases where the land belongs to absentee owners and tenants are forced to move...I found that the Jewish purchasers had provided compensation to enable the tenants to lease other property."
Lowdermilk reported that many Arab landowners had already begun to resist the agricultural advances and resented the success of the Jews, while the British in the area "are imbued with old colonial traditions and befriend feudal leaders." European diplomats often enjoyed going native by mimicking Arab grandees (who in turn were learning European ethnic prejudices and disdain for "men in trade"). Together they smeared these fully beneficial transactions with anti-Semitic slurs and caricatures. However, the results of the purchases were clear: "During the last 25 years (before 1939), Jews have acquired just six percent of Palestine's 6.5 million acres or 400 thousand acres, less than one quarter of which was previously cultivated by Arabs."
These new opportunities in Palestine attracted hundreds of thousands of Arab immigrants from Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and the desert. With wages for Arab workers double or more the wages in Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, in 1936, a British Royal Commission could report: "The whole range of public services has steadily developed to the benefit of the [Arab] fellaheen...the revenue for those services having been largely provided by the Jews."
Lowdermilk clinched his argument by a sophisticated comparison with conditions in Jordan. A country almost four times larger than Palestine (including Sinai), Jordan partakes of the same mountain fold of mesozoic limestone, the same rich river plains, the same Rift Valley and highlands, the same mineral resources, the same climate, and a several times larger population in ancient times. But at the time of Lowdermilk's visit, its agricultural output and per capita consumption of imports was one-fifth that of Palestine and its population density was one-tenth Palestine's.
Without Jewish settlements, Jordan was suffering heavy emigration (mostly to America and Palestine) while Palestine attracted increasing flows of immigrants, mostly clustering around the Jewish settlements. With Jewish advances in food production and in medicine and public hygiene, Arab health statistics increasingly converged with those of the Jewish settlers. While the Arab birth rate actually dropped by 10 percent, the death rate fell by one-third and infant mortality dropped 37 percent. The net result was an Arab annual population growth rate of 16.2 percent, the highest in the world (exclusive of immigration). Lowdermilk summed it up: "Rural Palestine is becoming less and less like Trans Jordan, Syria and Iraq and more like Denmark, Holland, and parts of the United States [Southern California]."
...
Lowdermilk predicted that "Arab rule in Palestine would...put an abrupt end to the reclamation work now being carried on so splendidly." Under Arab rule, Palestine has always been a somnolent desert land that could have sustained no authentic 20th-century Arab awakening. Palestine without Jews is not a nation but a naqba.
Many people imagine that the new and larger influx of Jewish settlers after World War II perpetrated an injustice on the Arabs. What they did, in fact, was to continue the heroic and ingenious pattern of development depicted by Lowdermilk in 1939. With the Arab population growing apace with the Jewish population in most neighborhoods, and indeed faster in some, there could not possibly have been any significant displacement. The demographic numbers discredit as simply mythological or mendacious all the literature of Palestinian grievance and eviction from the likes of Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim Rashid Khalidi, and the other divas of the naqba narrative.
By 1948, the Arab population in the Mandate area had grown to some 1.35 million, an increase of 60 percent since the 1930s, and up by a factor of seven since the arrival of the creative, far-seeing cohort of pioneering Jews from Russia in the 1880s. Mostly concentrated in neighborhoods abutting the Zionist settlements, this Arab population was the largest in the entire history of Palestine. Only the 1948 invasion by five Arab armies -- and a desperate and courageous Israeli self-defense -- drove out many of the Arabs, some 700,000. These Palestinian Arabs were evicted or urged to flee by Arab leaders in 1948 in a war that the Jews neither sought nor invited. But the creation of the State of Israel and its growing economy accelerated a renewed immigration into the area to today's level of some 5.5 million Arabs.
The only real Palestinian naqba came not in 1948 at the hands of Zionists, but rather in 1949, at the hands of foreign aid bureaucrats in the form of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). In a desire to compensate the Palestinians for their alleged victimization by the creation of the State of Israel, the international bureaucracies perpetrated and created a genuine and permanent victimization among the 1.4 million refugees who live in UNRWA's 59 camps and the millions more who reside in the surrounding ghettoes.
Financed by the U.S. and the European Union, as Michael S. Bernstam of Stanford's Hoover Institution explained in Commentary in December of 2010, UNRWA perpetuates the notion of a "right of return" to the land. Yet this land scarcely existed as an asset before the Jews reclaimed it and made it valuable and capable of supporting life. "This is not the right of return," writes Bernstam, "it is a claim of the right to retake..." or more accurately to seize the land outright from its lawful owners. A typical harvest of misconceived foreign aid, this tragic error extends the Palestinian grievance beyond Gaza and the West Bank into countries such as Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon that also host Palestinian camps.
The spurious ideology of Palestinian victimization by Israel blinds nearly all observers to the actual facts of economic life in the region. No one reading the current literature could have any idea that throughout most of the three roughly 20-year economic eras following 1948, the Palestinians continued to benefit heavily from Israeli enterprise and prospered mightily compared to Arabs in other countries in the region.
During the era of Israeli "occupation" that ran from after the war of 1967 to 1993, for example, the number of Arabs in the territories tripled to some 3 million, with the creation of some 261 new towns, a tripling of Arab per capita incomes, and a rise in life expectancy from 52 to 73 years. Meanwhile, the number of Israeli settlers in this area stripped of Jews by Jordan rose only to 250,000. Again, far from effecting any displacement of Arabs, the Jewish settlements enabled a huge increase in both the number and wealth of the Palestinian Arabs.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Jewish immigration, settlements
