When Bruce Pearl woke up on the morning of 7/10 at his home near Orbon College, whose basketball team he coaches, he spent 10 minutes praying, as he does every morning. But when he opened the phone immediately afterward, he was horrified: "What Israel is going through are unprecedented atrocities, cowardly terrorists directing their crimes against women and children," he described at the press conference after his team's victory at Barakleys Center that evening.
Pearl, 63, has deep ties to the State of Israel, grew up in a Reform Jewish home in Boston, spoke Yiddish with his grandparents, and experienced anti-Semitism throughout his childhood: "I grew up in Boston, and I saw real racism in great ethnic neighborhoods, there was real anti-Semitism there," he told NJ.COM website: "When you grow up being told that you murdered Jesus, you murdered the God of all my Christian friends, it's hard to deal with that when you're a kid. And obviously that gave me that identity."
Bruce Pearl. "God promised us Israel," Photo: AP
During the Six-Day War, when Pearl was 7 years old, Pearl came to visit his grandfather, Yaakov (Jack) Perlmutter, a Holocaust survivor who fled the Nazis: "I asked why he watched TV and didn't go to sleep, and he replied: 'I'm afraid that if I go to sleep, when I get up there will be no more State of Israel,' where I realized how important it was to him."
The United States did not put conditions on its aid to the Allies when WWII broke out! Hamas genocide is no different than the Nazis. All of the children in Gaza and Israel will be safer when these Barbarians are destroyed! https://t.co/RQ1BrZmAtg
— Bruce Pearl (@coachbrucepearl) November 19, 2023
"If Israel had been a Jewish state in the '20s, '30s and '40s, millions of Jews would have gone there and survived," Pearl said. "Therefore, Israel's survival, both before it was a state and after it was a state, is important to me. Israel was promised to us by God, and there lives with us forever."
In August 2022, Pearl took his team to Israel for three games against Israeli national teams and he hopes it will become an annual event that will bring the top college basketball teams to Israel. However, not everyone liked the idea of the trip.
Ibrahim Hofer, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, labeled it "propaganda garbage clearly designed to normalize Israeli apartheid and racial segregation, while ignoring Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights and international law."
"There are nine million people in Israel, six million Jews – ironically – and three million Arabs live together in this small and small area," Pearl said. So I don't want to hear about Israel being an apartheid state. This is democracy. It's actually a U.S. aircraft carrier right there in the Middle East."
Bruce Pearl and his actors visiting Israel, photo: Alan Shaver
Pearl, who has slightly reduced the frequency of social media posts since the season began, adds: "It's not politics, it's just good versus bad. Hamas must be eliminated and destroyed. And if there are other enemies in the Middle East who want to destroy Israel, including Hezbollah or the Iranian leadership, should Israel just sit and wait for them to do another October 7?"
This would be funny, if it wasn't so true! Israel needs to save the world from this insanity by destroying Hamas, Hezbollah and any other Iranian proxies that call for death to Israel and the USA https://t.co/OR69SeEawb
— Bruce Pearl (@coachbrucepearl) November 11, 2023
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