Eye on the Middle East Jul/Aug 2012
Jive talk is slang for deceptive or insincere speech. Los Angeles Lakers basketball forward Metta World Peace (Ron Artest) was jive talking when he said in April, “It was unfortunate that James [Harden] had to get hit with the unintentional elbow.” Peace was ejected from the game for delivering a vicious blow to Harden’s head.
Another example of jive talk took place in March at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its prestigious John F. Kennedy School of Government partially funded a student-run conference titled “Israel/Palestine and the One-State Solution.” A one-state—sometimes called binational—solution is the call for a singular, secular, democratic country in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip. The “solution” would strip Israel of its Jewish identity, remove the Law of Return that gives automatic citizenship to Jewish immigrants, and allow millions of Palestinians into the country.
Organizers stated the goal of the conference was “to educate ourselves and others about the possible contours of a one-state solution and the challenges that stand in the way of its realization.” A look at its planners, however, reveals their jive talk: Justice for Palestine, the Palestine Caucus, the Arab Caucus, and the Alliance for Justice in the Middle East. In fact, the organizers have called Israel an “apartheid state” responsible for ethnic cleansing, and they oppose Israel’s Law of Return.
If realized, their one-state solution would create a 23rd Arab state, eradicating the world’s only Jewish country—which is also the Middle East’s freest place for Muslims and its only democracy.
Most of the conference speakers were heavily anti-Israel. According to the news agency Arutz-7, they included the following:
Ali Abunimah, the executive director of the Electronic Intifada; Dalit Baum, of the BDS (Boycott Divestment and Sanctions) organization, Coalition of Women for Peace; Ilan Pappe, radical left Israeli academic and fervent supporter of the BDS movement; Marc Ellis, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University, who compares Zionism to colonialism and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazi treatment of Jews.
The conference’s academic atmosphere provided a smokescreen for its true agenda: promoting a vision for the region that is shared with terrorist organizations like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah.
Harvard’s own dean of the Kennedy School of Government recognized the conference’s jive talk:
I am deeply disappointed to see that the list of speakers for this student conference is so one-sided….Without the balance of divergent views that characterize the most enriching discussions, the credibility and intellectual value of any event is open to question.
U.S. Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) strongly condemned the conference, saying it “is dangerous thinking that gives comfort to Israel’s enemies who view the ‘one-state solution’ as a euphemism for eliminating Israel as a Jewish state. Harvard may have a right to do this, but that does not make it right.”
From A.D. 70 to 1948, the Jewish people were scattered throughout the world. They suffered as outcasts through such persecutions as the Crusades, pogroms, and the Holocaust. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it well when he said, “I will never let my people live under the shadow of annihilation….2012 is not 1944.” Netanyahu does not talk jive.
Unknown to these jive talkers is a one-state solution that will work. It won’t be democratic or secular. Its worldwide government will be theocratic, and its King will be Jesus. Jewish people will be the envy of the nations; and shalom—peace—will reign.
That is not jive talk; it is God’s talk. And His Word is settled in the heavens.
