friends and foes

Great Neck paper rips Israel pact

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Six North Shore Long Island community newspapers, including the Greak Neck News, tore into Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman’s economic, cultural and friendship pact with the Shomron, and criticized Israel’s presence in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusaelm.

In a full-page, 1,250-word editorial headlined, “Blakeman playing politics with Israel,” the Blank Slate Media publications targeted what they described as “Blakeman’s pandering to Jewish voters by appearing to support some form of annexation by Israel of occupied territories.”

The editorial equated Israel’s actions with “Russian President Vladimir Putin’s barbaric assault on Ukraine.”

“Preventing the annexation of land by any country has been the basis of the world order since World War II,” the editorial continued. “It is the reason the United States and NATO have united to forcefully oppose Russia’s invasion. Legitimizing some form of annexation by Israel undermines that argument in Ukraine and everywhere else.”

This view in relation to Israel and the Palestinians, while widely reported as fact, is not universally held, as The Jewish Star has reported.

“Now as Putin seeks to violate Ukraine’s sovereignty, Blakeman and [Rep. Lee] Zeldin strike an agreement intended to weaken the claims of Palestinian sovereignty for a homeland.”

The editorial challenged Israel's standing as a democratic state, urging that Blakeman "explain how Israel can remain both a Jewish state and a democratic state with a one-state solution [since] the Arab and Palestinian populations are expected to surpass the Jewish population in the not-too-distant future."

An Arab population surge was widely discussed a decade ago, and Haaretz then cited a Palestinian Authority report which predicted that Arabs would outnumber Jews by 2020. In 2022, three-fourths of Israel's population is Jewish. Population ratios are different in specific parts of the country and in Judea and Samaria.

The editorial suggested that companies like Ben & Jerry’s / Unilever which support BDS should not be penalized because their boycott “applied only to the territories Israel had occupied since 1967. Not to Israel itself.”

Blank Slate's other newspapers are in Port Washington, Roslyn, Manhasset, Williston and New Hyde Park.

Updated with reference to population ratios, May 19 at 6 am