He’s a zealot and proud of it

Jerry Verlin is a zealot in the best sense of the word, a word which is rooted in Jewish history.

As is the 84-year-old Verlin, but also the present, specifically the State of Israel, about which he is deeply knowledgeable and of which he is an indefatigable supporter.

For almost 25 years, he has taken on the almost thankless mission of defending Israel, which includes what he sees as massive bias on the part of news outlets from the local Philadelphia Inquirer, all the way up to the Associated Press, with other stops in between.

Since 2001, he has published a weekly newsletter, “Here & Now,” with number 1,253 just hitting my mailbox on Sunday, like clockwork. In his self-deprecatory style, he refers to subscribers to the free newsletter as “You who put up with me weekly.”

I am one, and I don’t agree with everything he has to say. He’s OK with disagreement, saying his goal is to make people, mostly Jews, “think about issues, confronting us, from anti-Israel media bias to Zionism.”

For Jerry, it is a labor of love, almost a religious calling, you might say.

A native of West Mount Airy, he earned a degree from Penn Law, which he used, but did not enjoy, for a decade, after which he drifted into business. It was the ‘70s, the dawn of the age of computers, and Jerry wound up writing software accounting and control programs for manufacturers. 

He also wrote a book, “Israel 3,000 Years,” about the history — past and present — of the Jewish state, and co-authored the heavily documented “Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed from A to Z.” 

I have used each of them from time to time when writing about the situation in the Mideast, especially when revolving around Israel, which I have visited three times.

Now, Writer Cosmos has published “Here & Now: U.S. Jews and the Issues Confronting Us,” which is mostly excerpts from his life’s work — the weekly Here & Now newsletters. The book is $17.99 in hardcover but it is available in several versions on Amazon, and this link should take you there.

A significant part of the work celebrates the rebirth of Israel after 1,800 years, and defends the Jewish peoples’ rightful claim on its historical homeland, a simple fact that is denied by many in today’s world.

One example, coming from the Left, is the provable falsehood that defines Israel as post-World War II white European colonizers, oppressors of indigenous Arab Palestinians. 

Almost all of that is a lie. As Jerry notes, Jews have been in that area since before the birth of Jesus. White European colonizers? Not a chance.

When it comes to Israel, there are nearly as many falsehoods and distortions as there are anti-Semites, and there is no shortage of those.

But not every critic of Israel policy is an anti-Semite. There are hundreds of thousands of Israelis who oppose the right-wing policies of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. They are not anti-Semites, but other critics are Jew haters. One must avoid smearing everyone with the same brush.

I called Jerry’s efforts thankless, because some of the hills he chose to defend were lost long ago.

Such as the term West Bank, which refers to the west bank of the Jordan river that separates Jordan from Israel.

Everyone nowadays calls it the West Bank, which is where a proposed Palestinian state will be planted.

Not if Jerry can help it.

He has argued for decades that the correct term, the term the United Nations itself used for the area, was “the hill country of Samaria and Judea.”

The what?

Sometimes called “Biblical terms,” they clearly resonate with “Jewishness,” which is why, Jerry argues, the terms are suppressed, to divorce them from the claims of Jewish Israelis. I say “Jewish Israelis” because 20% of Israelis are Arabs, and have full rights of citizenship, a fact that destroys the lie that Israel is an “apartheid” state, something wrongly promulgated by the title of a book by former President Jimmy Carter, for which he eventually apologized.

When you say “apartheid,” think of what South Africa was. Blacks then were not voting citizens, they could not live where they wanted, nor attend schools with whites. Apartheid meant apart, something that never applied to Arab citizens of Israel.

Arab citizens of Israel go to schools they choose, live where they choose, and are elected to the Knesset, what Israel calls its parliament. In all candor, while Arabs have full rights, they are relieved of the responsibility of mandatory military service. 

Some trustworthy nonJewish sects, such as Druze, and Christians, are accepted as volunteers. 

Jerry describes his mission as to motivate Jews “to avail ourselves of our opportunity, nay obligation, to stand up for respect and dignity for Jews in America and our peoples’ homeland in Israel. This book is a compilation of excerpts from my ‘best’ currently relevant weekly emails.”

His first kvetch began with an oft-repeated canard, that some 4 million Arab Palestinians in 1948 were forced or fled Israel to create the formation of the Jewis state.

Jerry answered: “Four million Palestinian refugees did not flee. Some 600-800,000 left (matched by an unmentioned equivalent number of Jews from Arab lands). They did not leave because of ‘the creation of Israel,’  but in circumstances which the Inquirer chose not to mention.” The United Nations had voted to partition Palestine into majority Jewish and Arab states. The Jews accepted, but in an attempt  to seize all Palestine and “drive the Jews into the sea,” the Arabs rejected partition with violence and a five-nation invasion. Israel survived and absorbed the Jewish refugees. Egypt, and Jordan, seized what could have become Arab Palestine in 1948 and, along with other Arab states, kept the Arab refugees in camps ever since.

These facts are indisputable, yet are rarely stated.

Ever since, even though generations have passed, many Arabs claim the “right of return” to their homes in Israel. This is like the British demanding the right to return to their homes in Boston and Roanoke.

The “Arab exodus” issue led to a sidewalk demonstration outside the Inquirer headquarters in 2003, followed by an apology from foreign editor Ned Warwick agreeing that the paper’s description of what happened was inexact and incomplete. In other words, wrong. 

Such victories were few and far between.

Jerry’s fights are not limited to enemies, or to supposedly neutral observers, such as the Inquirer.

He has battled with pro-Israel entitities such as the Jewish Exponent, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, and, to a lesser extent, me.

Such as that hopeless fight to have the West Bank called Judea and Samaria. That boat has sailed and despite Jerry’s accurcate arguments, the boat is not coming back.

When he fought with CAMERA, the group explained that it uses journalistic norms in its fight for fair treatment.

Jerry sees the norms as implicitly flawed.

In the midst of the heat of battles, plenty of light is generated. His arguments are based on fact and the Bible can be trusted.

His library contains 3,000 books on Judaism and Jewish history.

He is one of a kind, and so is his book, a useful tool for anyone to understand Israel’s side of the argument.