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Friday October 22, 1999

Jews should come 'home' to Israel, settler says in S.F.

MARTIN KASSMAN
Bulletin Correspondent

It isn't every day that one hears an American-born Jew criticizing this country for taking God out of government and predicting that Jews will someday be forced to leave the United States.

But Gary Cooperberg is not your average American-born Jew. The 54-year-old New York City native now makes his home in Hebron, a town in the West Bank -- or Judea, as Cooperberg prefers to call it. And he wants no part of what is typically referred to as the Mideast peace process.

Cooperberg was in San Francisco this week as part of a U.S. tour to raise money for his Project Shofar -- whose purpose is "sounding the alarm to the Jewish people to wake up and make plans to come home" to Israel -- and for a Kiryat Arba yeshiva, where he works in public relations.

He spoke to an audience of about 35 at Congregation Anshey Sfard in San Francisco on Monday evening.

Helene Klein, regional chair of Americans for a Safe Israel, introduced Cooperberg and offered her own criticism of the peace process.

"Arafat and his henchmen only want to wait until Israel is weak enough that they can destroy it," Klein charged.

Cooperberg began his lecture on a similar theme.

"It wasn't so long ago that I can remember that everybody in the world knew that Yasser Arafat was a terrorist and murderer," he said of the Palestinian Authority's leader. "Today it would seem that everybody thinks he's a nice guy, a man of peace, a diplomat."

But Cooperberg opined that almost no one really believes that about Arafat. "We're living a lie," he said.

"Mr. Clinton is a liar when he talks about 'enemies of peace,'" he asserted, "because there is no such animal."

Everyone wants peace, Cooperberg said -- even a Palestinian suicide bomber.

"But [the bomber's] kind of peace means a peace without Jews in his country, and he's willing to die for his beliefs," Cooperberg said. "There's something to be admired with that kind of dedication. There used to be Jews that had dedication like that, too."

When an audience member pointed out that Israel and the Palestinians have signed a peace agreement, Cooperberg responded that the 1993 Oslo Accords are illegal.

Israeli politician "Shimon Peres had no right to sit with Mr. Arafat. It was against the law. He should have been arrested and tried for treason, and instead he's awarded with [a] peace prize," he said.

Switching gears, Cooperberg spoke fondly of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, his former boss and founder of the militant Jewish Defense League. Cooperberg worked as his press spokesman during Kahane's controversial tenure as a Knesset member. Kahane, who advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the territories, was shot to death in New York in 1990.

At the time he was killed, Cooperberg said, Kahane was trying to "help Jews think about going home."

Now Cooperberg has taken up that cause. He exhorted his listeners to visit Israel and start making plans to live there. "The future in this country, like any other of our exiles, is limited," Cooperberg said.

He predicted that the United States, like many other countries before it, will one day force Jews to leave.

America, according to Cooperberg, "still is good, but it's changing. God has been taken out of the governmental process. People are taking their children out of school because they don't like the kind of morality being taught in school. This used to be 'one nation under God,' but the God part seems to be disappearing."

In an interview, Cooperberg expanded on his belief about Jews' ultimate departure from the United States.

The Bible, he said, clearly states God's plan that Jews return "from all four corners of the world" to Israel.

"He would like this to happen in a nice way," Cooperberg said. "But if we refuse to leave, if we make ourselves too comfortable, then He makes the situation intolerable [so] that we have to leave." This has happened in every country in which Jews have lived, according to Cooperberg.

Still, he added, "I have no bad things to say about America."

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