Drs. Jan and Cornelia Flora are rural sociologists and Professors Emeriti at Iowa State University. The Floras visited Israel and the West Bank in 2015, relying on friends and acquaintances in both places as guides and sources for contacts; this was not a group tour. During their two-week visit, they spent about equal amounts of time in Israel and Palestine but did not visit Gaza. Later, they took an intensive week-long course with a Cornell University professor on U.S. policy toward Israel. Jan Flora relies mainly on newspapers, such as Ha’aretz (online English language newspaper from Israel) and the New York Times, for contemporary news on Israel and Palestine.

President Joe Biden gave a heartfelt speech on October 10 in support of Israel and against Hamas’ terrorism. He recalled his memorable first meeting with Prime Minister Golda Meir, when he was a first-term U.S. senator. She told him, “We (Israelis) have a secret weapon:  We have nowhere else to go.” 

But, President Biden, isn’t the fundamental issue that there are two peoples—Jewish Israelis and Palestinians—in the same territory with “nowhere else to go”? In 2007, former President Jimmy Carter called the control that Israel exercises over Palestinians an apartheid system.

The policies of Biden and Donald Trump fail to consider that simple truth.

Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association. Laura Belin contributed some reporting to this article.

Like all Iowans of good will, I was painfully alerted to the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7. Many have compared the events to the 9/11 al-Qaeda terrorist attack, in both its surprise and savagery. The scale of deaths and human loss is enormous; Israel’s total population is around 9 million.

The United States and European Union have designated Hamas a terrorist organization because of its armed resistance against Israel. Hamas has sponsored years of suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israel, claiming Jewish presence in Palestine is illegitimate, which is counter-historical and denied by the United States.

Henry Jay Karp is the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Emanuel in Davenport, Iowa, which he served from 1985 to 2017. He is the co-founder and co-convener of One Human Family QCA, a social justice organization. In this photo from 2001, he is standing in front of a salt rock in the Negev (southern Israel).

A death toll of over 2,800 and growing. Some 150 Israelis—men, women, children, the elderly—held hostage in Gaza by the terrorist organization Hamas. Entire families massacred. Bodies of dead babies. Israel is in a struggle to the death with its blood enemy, Hamas.

Being a New Yorker born and bred, I must admit that I never felt the need to fly until, as a college graduate, I joined my classmates as we boarded a flight to Israel, bound for our first year of rabbinic study in Jerusalem. It did not take long before I fell in love with the 4,000-year-old homeland of my people. Since then, I have journeyed there several times.  It is my home away from home; second in my heart only to my beloved U.S.A.

As a lover of Israel, I can attest that these days a heavy cloud hangs over the Jewish people, not only in Israel but around the world. It’s a cloud of anguish, violence, fear, death, and profound grief, born of the recent Hamas attacks waged against the Israeli towns and villages on Israel’s southern border, along with the ongoing barrage of missiles fired by Hamas, targeting civilian populations as far away from Gaza as Tel Aviv. The pain of Jews is very real and very raw, as there is hardly a Jewish household, inside and outside of Israel, untouched by a personal loss because of this, the greatest mass murder and hostage taking of Jews since the Holocaust.

Jodie Butler’s career of more than 45 years includes work at the local, state, national and international levels from teaching to education and technology policy development. She was Governor Terry Branstad’s education policy advisor (January 1994 to October 1998), with responsibilities for policy/law development, budget initiatives, constituent services, and agency liaison to multiple state agencies.

I had some amazing opportunities from 1994-1998. One memory came flooding back after the latest Hamas terrorist attack against Israel.

It was my first day on the job as Governor Branstad’s education policy advisor in January 1994. I was reassigned to be his aide that day and attended the convention of the Iowa Utility Association. Hundreds of people were at the convention center luncheon, yet one could have heard a pin drop for the 30 minutes that Thomas Sutherland spoke. It will remain one of the highlights of my public service to have had the chance to hear him.

Writing under the handle “Bronxiniowa,” Ira Lacher, who actually hails from the Bronx, New York, is a longtime journalism, marketing, and public relations professional.

For more than five years, China has subjected its 11 million mostly Muslim Uyghur minority to imprisonment, as well as forced labor and other repressions. Yet, there is no mass worldwide movement to boycott, divest and sanction made-in-China products, as has arisen against those made in Israel.

Serbia has long been targeted as a country that routinely subjects dissidents, as well as its Roma and other minorities, to systematic human rights abuses. Yet there has been no concerted effort to expel that country from the United Nations, as the world body has frequently been called on to do with Israel.

And for years, Egyptian border patrols have blockaded the movement of goods from Gaza into Sinai, causing hardship to the 2.2 million residents living there. Yet, Hamas didn’t attack Egypt, just Israel, firing on civilians, taking hundreds hostage, and apparently murdering them.

While other nations—including the U.S. and the United Kingdom—have established empires, repressed minority populations within them and perpetrated belligerent acts many consider war crimes, no other country in the history of the world has been regarded as an international pariah as has Israel. 

Ira Lacher: Jews have not, can not, and must not support people whose mission is to undermine everything that has made the United States of America a haven for Jews.

The following is a copy of an email I sent to someone I know at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This organization, which calls itself a “bipartisan American organization that advocates for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship,” recently has become anything but.

“AIPAC slammed for endorsing Republicans who refused to certify Biden’s election,” reported The Times of Israel.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency headlined: “AIPAC’s PAC endorses dozens of Republicans who refused to certify Joe Biden as president.”

And the fiercely pro-Israel Jerusalem Post, owned by the right-wing Murdoch clan that owns Fox News, noted: “AIPAC’s PAC endorses dozens of Republicans who refused to certify Joe Biden as president.” The article, which reported that the group endorsed 59 Democrats and 61 Republicans, included “Jim Jordan of Ohio, was prominent in the events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection.”

I know a young man who has a prominent position in AIPAC. I was honored to be present at his bar mitzvah, I remain good friends with his family, and, as such, I had to write him personally about this. What follows is the text of my email to him. I have deleted his name and position because I know that, in this stupid age, people mistakenly believe they have the right to harass someone they disagree with.