The UCI-Olive Tree Initiative- From an Orange County Rabbi

Rabbi Dov Fischer of Orange County has taken a strong interest in the controversy here regarding the Olive Tree Initiative at UCI and the question of Jewish support for this program. With his permission, I am posting his message below. (I have linked Rabbi Fischer's blog, "Young Israel of Orange County" to my own.)

"Hi, everyone.


I live in a place where, at the local university, Arab Moslem students and radical liberal Jewish professors often compare Israel to Nazi Germany, and Zionism to Nazism and racism. Perhaps you live near such a place, too. My place is called “earth.”

I write as a section in northern Israel is ablaze with the worst forest fire in Israel’s history. Trees can be re-planted. Lives cannot be replaced in this world. I note that the deaths in Israel occurred almost exclusively from an effort by the Government of Israel to save the lives of incarcerated criminal “Palestinians” (i.e., Arabs who were living in Judea and Samaria). The “Palestinian” Arabs would have burned to a crisp in their prison. Israel risked and lost dozens of precious Jewish lives to try saving those people, “Palestinian” criminals one and all.

Let us set aside for now the Jew-haters of Europe, Africa, Asia. Rather, there are students in America right now trying to boycott “Sabra” hummus at Princeton University in the Ivy League and at some other universities because that brand is connected with Israel, “a racist Nazi state.” As a result, our shul no longer will use any brand of hummus at kiddush and Seudah Shlishit except for “Sabra” brand. Meanwhile, the Orange County Jewish Federation gives thousands of dollars in money grants to UCI Jewish students to help assist with the cost of their tuition and airfare to attend “Olive Tree Institute” (“O T I ”) programs in the Middle East, where those Jewish students travel along with Arab Moslem students, Druze, and Christian students, and are brought to “Palestine/ The West Bank” to hear trained and skilled world-class anti-Israel Palestinian Arab propagandists like George Rishmawi explain the Palestinian viewpoint, with the presentations tailored to the nuanced ear of the American students, aimed at sending back confused young people better sensitized to Palestinian aspirations. (Adding to the students’ confusion, while half the OTI program feeds them Palestinian propaganda inside the Arab villages of the “Palestinian West Bank,” the other half brings them within Israel to hear a diversity of views ranging from stronger Zionist to left-wing Israeli views. They then come home, courtesy of the Orange County Jewish Federation, believing they have heard “balance” and that they now are better informed than they had been before their OTI trip.) And the Orange County Hillel endorses this Olive Tree Institute program.

That is the crazy world in which we live.

I am reminded of the Zionism-racism canard. In the world of reality, outside this “topsy-turvy world,” Israel stands as the only country in world history that undertook to evacuate masses of Black people from the heartland of Africa for the purpose of bringing them from oppression to equal-status citizenship and freedom. Now dozens of Israeli lives have been lost saving “Palestinian” Arab criminal prisoners who were in harm’s way. It is something to think about, something to teach our children.

And, if you are going to plant an olive tree, plant it in Israel."


Rabbi Dov Fischer
Rav, Young Israel of Orange County