The UN war on Israel’s high ground

Peloni:  Bravo Moshe!  The cities and towns in Judea and Samaria, and those in the Golan, are deserving of the support and recognition that they are cities and towns, built on Jewish lands whose connection stretches back over three millennia.  These are not occupied territories, and the cities are not settlements.  These pernicious pejoratives are vehicles of propaganda, no different than the false narrative created by the routine use of the baseless term “West Bank”.  While we should have no expectation that the Arabs, even the most moderate of them, would have strength and character enough to admit the truth of these matters, we should have every expectation that the leader of the WJC would be able to not only admit these truths, but to herald them before the world, especially as he has held this post for nearly two decades.

American Jewish leaders must come to understand that to critics of Israel, there is no difference between “settlements” in Judea and Samaria and “settlements” on the Golan.

Moshe Phillips | Dec 8, 2025

View of Syria from the Israeli part of the Golan Heights. Photo by Sam Mugraby, Photos8.com, CC BY 2.0, Wikipedia

The bureaucratic diplomats at the United Nations again demonstrated their addiction to attacking Israel’s best interests with a vote on Dec. 2 about the Golan. In a resolution sponsored by Egypt, 123 nations voted for Syrian control over the Golan Heights and for Israel to return to the June 4, 1967 lines.

The resolution received much more support than in 2024, when 97 nations voted against multiple generations of Israeli families remaining in their homes on the Golan. The resolution states that Israel’s decision in December 1981 to expand sovereignty must be rescinded.

What’s more, the U.N. General Assembly had a second vote on Dec. 5 that labeled Israeli communities on the Golan as “illegal.” A total of 146 nations voted in favor of this resolution.

Can you imagine the danger Israel would have faced last December when chaos enveloped Syria? Or if, on Oct. 7, 2023, Iranian proxy terrorists on a Syrian-controlled Golan had joined Hamas and Hezbollah, and opened up a third front against the Jewish state?

If Israel had surrendered to U.S. demands in the 1990s to give up the Golan Heights, how many Israeli lives would have been lost in the ensuing 25 years?

On March 25, 2019, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the following to U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House: “Mr. President, just as Israel stood tall in 1967, just as it stood tall in 1973, Israel stands tall today. We hold the high ground, and we shall never give it up. Mr. President, we have a saying in Israel. I’ll say it in Hebrew. It says, Ha’am im Hagolan. That means, ‘The people are with the Golan.’ But thanks to you, we now know that there are two peoples who stand with the Golan: the people of Israel and the people of America. So, on behalf of all the people of Israel: Thank you, President Trump.”

On the same day as the first U.N. vote about the Golan, Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, was speaking across town at the Israel Hayom summit in Manhattan. He stated that there is “a full-scale assault on truth, on democracy and on the safety of Jewish people everywhere.”

He could have said “everywhere at the United Nations” and been correct.

Additionally, Lauder declared that “there are Muslims and Arabs who reject terrorism, who reject extremism, who reject using Israel as an excuse for hatred. Let us build a coalition so strong, so united, so determined, that no extremist movement can fracture it.”

Lauder, who has served as president of the WJC since 2007, is demanding far too much from Israel. Israel cannot be expected to build this fantasy “coalition” while Hamas is still armed and in power in Gaza. In fact, it shouldn’t even be discussed now.

Truthfully, such ideas as this “coalition” have no place in the current Middle East era of autocracies, when there are no true democracies in the region besides Israel. The Arab world is legendary for revolutions and violent coups; it is beyond naive to suggest that Israel can risk a Palestinian state of any size just to be part of some anti-extremist “coalition” that could prove to be short-lived and extremely ineffective.

And make no mistake: A Palestinian state is the price that the Gulf sheikdoms and other authoritarian, repressive regimes that comprise the region would exact from Israel to launch this “coalition.”

In August 2025, Lauder said “the inciteful calls” from Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to “ ‘bury the idea of a Palestinian state’ are wholly unbecoming of a representative of the state of Israel.”

American Jewish leaders must come to understand that, to critics of Israel, there is no difference between “settlements” in Judea and Samaria and “settlements” on the Golan. When American Jews attack the rights of Jewish families to live in Judea and Samaria, the Israelis in the Golan are put even more at risk.

Just weeks after Lauder’s broadside against Smotrich, the Hamas-led terrorist invasion of communities in southern Israel caused Israelis who were previously open to it to rethink a Palestinian state.

Perhaps the best example of this is Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who in January said to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, that “the idea of the two-state solution is something which, on record, I supported in the past, many times. But I would say that I had a wake-up call following Oct. 7, in the sense that I want to hear my neighbors say how much they object, regret, condemn and do not accept in any way the terrible tragedy of the terror attack of Oct. 7 and the fact that terror cannot be the tool to get there.”

It is long past time for American Jewish leaders to “wake up” and realize that, just as Israel’s leaders in the 1990s were right to stand with the Israeli communities in the Golan Heights, they are right today to support Israelis who wish to remain in Judea and Samaria, despite that critics such as U.N. diplomats, Zakaria and even Lauder dismiss these communities as “settlements.”