(NEW YORK) Herut North America is urging President-elect Joe Biden to refrain from choosing former State Department official Dennis Ross as the next United States ambassador to Israel.

Herut North America is a leading American Zionist organization focused on Zionist pride and education and is dedicated to the ideals of pre-World War II Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky.

Responding to news reports that Ross is one of the candidates being considered for the position, Herut North America released this statement:

Dennis Ross has a long track record of pressuring and undermining America’s ally, Israel, which should make him unacceptable as a U.S. ambassador to Israel. Ross’s record includes:

* CEMENT FOR HAMAS. Ross has admitted that he pressured Israel to allow cement into Gaza even though Israel told him that Hamas would use it to build tunnels for terrorism—which is exactly what happened. (Washington Post, Aug. 8, 2014)

* FREEZE JERUSALEM. Ross has demanded that Israel be prevented from building any new Jewish neighborhoods in its own capital city, Jerusalem. (New York Times, May 22, 2014)

* AID FOR TERROR REGIME. Ross wants the U.S. to give $200 million to the Palestinian Authority—even though the PA still incites hatred of Jews and Israel, shelters fugitive terrorists, and refuses to disarm terrorist groups. (The Hill, Sept. 13, 2018)

* INDEFENSIBLE BORDERS. Ross says that Israel should agree to the establishment of a sovereign “Palestine” in 92% of Judea-Samaria. That would mean squeezing Israel into essentially the indefensible pre-1967 borders, so Israel would be only nine miles wide. Abba Eban called those borders “Auschwitz lines.” (See Ross’s “Toward a New Paradigm for Addressing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Jan. 2017, Washington Institute for Near East Policy)

* STARVE THE JEWS. Ross has called for “shrinking” 78 of the Jewish communities in Judea-Samaria—that is, starving them until they “leave,” or condemning them to live in a Palestinian state. (New York Daily News, Feb. 2, 2020)  Isn’t starving Jewish communities into submission or exile is something we would associate with some of the most tragic periods in Jewish history…?

* SURRENDER GOLAN. Ross condemned American recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, saying if the U.S. really wanted to advance peace, “this not a step that you would take” (New York Times, March 21, 2019). Meaning, he wants to leave the door open to the possibility of giving the strategically vital Golan to the mass murderers of Syria’s dictatorship.

* MORAL EQUIVALENCY. Ross has said that Israel’s negotiating approach “is very reminiscent of the Palestinian approach” and he even directly compared Israel’s leaders to Yasser Arafat. So in Ross’s mind, there is moral equivalency between the only democracy in the Middle East and some of the most savage terrorists in history. (The Hill, July 1, 2020)

* DOWNPLAYING ARAB TERRORISM. Ross claims that “The second Intifada …didn’t produce bombings during the Clinton administration, it wait(ed) until the Bush administration.” (CBSNews.com July 24, 2019)

This downplaying of Arab terrorism is a rewriting of the historical record. During the last three months of the Clinton Administration, Palestinian Arab terrorists murdered 42 Israelis and injured hundreds more. That was the period of the infamous lynching (and disemboweling) of two Israelis in Ramallah. Has Ross forgotten about that atrocity?

Ross also referred to “a second Intifada where over 4,000 Palestinians died, 1,000 Israelis died”—again suggesting moral equivalency between the Palestinian Arabs who were killed while committing terrorism, and the Israelis who were the victims of those terrorists.