3,000 years after the Jewish people left Egyptian slavery bound for the land of Israel, their freedom remains as elusive as ever. A new Pharaoh adjacent not to the Nile, but the Potomac, looks out from the White House and issues his decrees regarding the Jews.
No sooner does a Jew build a house in Jerusalem, than one of the Pharaoh's flunkies rushes to condemn him for it. A week before Passover, one of those flunkies announced that the administration was both "deeply concerned" and "very worried" about new Jewish homes in Jerusalem. A day later Jewish families hoping to be able to live in their own holy city were greeted with the announcement that approval for more housing had been suspended to avoid offending the little man with the big ears in the White House.
The Obama Administration has spent more time condemning housing in Jerusalem, than genocide in the Sudan.
If some parts of Israel are constantly being shelled by terrorists, the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem is constantly being shelled by administration spokesmen. Year after year, the people of an overcrowded city are frustrated in their efforts to find a place to live, when some White House or State Department flunky finishes sipping his coffee, gets up in front of a microphone and expresses the grave concern of his master that a new condominium might go up in a place where Jews had been living long before the religion of Obama's grandmother was even a twinkle in her mad prophet's eye.
Building permits in Jerusalem now undergo a perverse kind of astrology. Approvals for every stage of the process must happen at a time when no administration official is visiting Jerusalem, and no Israeli official is visiting the US. When Biden visited Jerusalem at the same time that a municipal housing approval came through-- the administration staged a convulsive spectacle.Biden threw a fit and stood up Netanyahu, Hillary Clinton shrilled that the housing approvals "were not only an insult to Biden, but an insult to the United States" and then spent 43 minutes berating the prime minister over the phone over what would have been a minor municipal issue in her own country.
"There was an affront, it was an insult", chimed in David Axelrod. A hundred media outlets took up the theme. The theme being that the Jews had gotten so arrogant that they were approving construction in their own city at the same time that a politician who had three times endorsed Jerusalem as the undivided capital had stopped by for a visit. Pharaoh was determined to prevent the Jewish people from going off to build their own country. And now Obama is determined that Jews should not build in their own city.
There is a vicious irony in the administration applying such repression before Passover, a holiday of free men and women taken out of the bonds of Egypt against the will of its tyrant. A reminder that the millions of Jews who cry out, "Next Year in Jerusalem" are reminded that a new tyrant bars their way.
"Let My People Go", redefined the men and women who had been Pharaoh's slaves as "Ami", the People of G-d. Not slaves of a tyrant, but a people and a nation whose only allegiance was to their Creator. To say to a tyrant, "Let My People Go" is to deny his physical and moral authority. His right to dispose of their lives as he sees fit. It begins the process of breaking the chains of the flesh, by breaking the chains of the spirit that binds a people to slavery.
Obama, Let My People Go. Let them go live in Jerusalem and throughout their land. Take away your chains and your pyramids and your Palestinian state. Stop your financing of Islamic terrorists. Keep your press releases and your flacks, and your notes of "deep concern" every time a hammer hits a nail in territory claimed by your Islamic friends. Your way is not that of peace, but of appeasement. Your law is the will of terrorists and their enablers. This is not your land. It is not the land of the Muslim conquerors whose rights you so assiduously defend. You have no physical or moral authority here.