#1207 3/10/24 – Grassroots US Jews, We Have a Jewish History Task HERE and NOW

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  President Biden’s push for a Two-State Solution in Thursday night’s State of the Union Address, following tens of thousands of “Uncommitted” Democratic primary votes Tuesday, underlines the gravity of today’s times for our Jewish homeland of Israel.  Its Dream of Generations struggle for secure, Jewishly meaningful independence is still going on.  We grassroots American Jews have to support our brethren in Israel.

Grassroots US Jews: We Have a Jewish History Task HERE and NOW

Just for kicks, well, maybe not fully that, a few years ago, I asked each of You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly when and where you’d have liked to have lived during our people’s three-millennia sojourn through history so you could have been involved in a seminal happening.  Would you have uprooted yourself with Abraham from all that was familiar at the Call of a God you’d never known to follow Him to a land that He would show you?  Would you have stood with Moses at Sinai, with David entering what became the City of David, with Solomon dedicating the Temple, with the Maccabees fighting Alexander’s successors?  Or would you opt for Here and Now?  I had no takers but me for that last role.

I was eight years old on that fourteenth of May, 1948, when Ben-Gurion, standing beneath Herzl’s portrait in a Tel Aviv museum in the lengthening shadows of Erev Shabbat, called on the Jews of the World, in Israel’s Declaration of Independence,

“to rally to our side in the tasks of immigration and development and to stand by us in the struggle for fulfillment of the dream of generations for our homeland’s redemption.”

I was older than eight before I understood he was speaking to me.   But that call is still out there.  We think of Israel as having fought all these wars – the War of 1948-49, the Sinai Campaign, the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War ….  These and others were battles.  There has been only one war – Israel’s War of Independence and it is still going on.

Israel today is facing unprecedented international hostility.  To cite just one almost-beyond-belief governmental canard, the Foreign Office of Britain – Britain, THE most white colonial empire of modern times, the British Empire upon which “the sun never set” – held a teach-in for its civil servants this week “criticizing Israel as a ‘colonialist’ white nation state.”  (TJV, 3/6/24).  Tell that to the desperate Holocaust survivor escapees from Europe in, inter alia, Exodus 1947, intercepted by the British Empire’s before-during-and-after-the-Holocaust anti-Jewish Palestine blockade (entrapping millions of Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe) and sent back to Germany in three British prison ships, one of them with “Empire” as part of its name.

But it’s the American situation which must be confronted by American Jews.  It’s not the “genocide, apartheid,” etc., canards, or even the “From the River to the Sea” street chants that are the most dangerous.  It’s what seems, superficially, Solomonly fair to both sides – a “two-state solution” sharing Palestine between Arabs and Jews.

“Two-States” would be egregiously unjust and existentially fatal to our Jewish homeland of Israel, but it is exactly what President Biden declared in his State of the Union address Thursday night:

“As we look to the future, the only real solution is a two-state solution.  I say this as a lifelong supporter of Israel and the only American president to visit Israel in wartime.  There is no other path that guarantees Israel’s security and democracy.  There is no other path that guarantees Palestinians can live with peace and dignity,” he said.”  [emphasis added]

I appreciate that many grassroots American Jews, among them long and loyal subscribers hereto, see “the two-state solution” as equitable and/or inevitable.  And I appreciate too that those of you who support and/or see its inevitability are tiring of me railing against it.  I’m tiring too.  So this week let me cite to you the united voice (99 of 120 members) of among the least internally-agreed parliamentary bodies on earth, the Israeli Knesset, reflecting the two-state solution rejection of most Israelis.  Times of Israel, 2/22/24:

“Knesset Votes Resoundingly Against Unilateral Palestinian State Recognition”

So it’s not just Bibi but the Knesset, reflecting the view of the vast majority of Jewish Israelis.  And this is infinitely more equitable to Arabs than the vastly Arab-and-allies-championed “From the River to the Sea” view is to us Jews. 

Last week (#1206) I discussed Trump Ambassador to Israel David Friedman’s new revision to the Trump Israeli-Palestinian Arab peace plan that had been developed just before being sidelined by the even-better Abraham Accords.  That Trump plan had been, in addition to Jordan (the Mandate’s Eastern Palestine with its Palestinian Arab majority) and Arab Gaza, internal autonomy for Palestinian Arabs in a bigger chunk of Judea-Samaria than they occupy now, with Israel declaring sovereignty over part of Judea-Samaria.  Friedman’s new amendment would extend Israeli sovereignty to the entirety of Judea-Samaria.

This sounds not too far, but there’s a critical difference, from what Biden Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew envisions, as quoted in that pre-State of the Union TOI article of 2/22:

“‘Now is a moment in time when there is a real possibility that by engaging in normalization and negotiations with Saudi Arabia,’ along with reforms in the Palestinian Authority, ‘there can be a demilitarized Palestinian state.  But Israel will have to make that choice,’ Lew said.”  [emphasis added]

There is much more than a semantic difference between “internal autonomy” and “a demilitarized Palestinian state.”  The key attribute in history of “demilitarized” states is that they don’t stay in that state.  There has to be unequivocal Israeli security control west of the Jordan River.  And the difficulty, as had begun to appear, with the original Trump plan, was in mapping just where the lines of partial sovereignty of Israel in Judea-Samaria would lie.  So, gentle readers, I beseech your support for Friedman’s revised full sovereignty plan.

Further, look at the map of western Palestine, the land of Israel.  Any carving of it up along the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines (the two-state solution’s “1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps”) would be based not at all along geographically natural or even visible boundaries, but on where the two 1949 armies then stood.  Those ceasefire lines didn’t extend north and south from between “west” and “east” Jerusalem, but veered west from bifurcated Jerusalem, leaving an Arab-overlooked narrow corridor that in the 1948 war necessitated “the Burma road.”  Look at Radar Hill, at Latrun.  Then look at the 9-miles-wide lowland further north.   Is resurrecting this map a path that “guarantees Israel’s security” as Biden said Thursday night in his speech?  Or is it an irresistible invitation to invasion by foes?

And think about the consequence of Israel surrendering historic Jerusalem, loss of control of which had anguished Jews for eighteen hundred years.  And loss of control of the biblical Judea-Samaria hill country heartland, from a Jewish as well as military perspective.  It’s for Israelis, not Diaspora Jews, to decide whether to meekly walk out of our people’s homeland’s historic heart, but their having decided against this, we grassroots American Jews need to support them in this, even in the face of US, UN, EU et al opposition.

President Biden is under a great deal of electoral pressure.  Except in Michigan and Minnesota, I find it difficult to believe that the tens of thousands of votes for “Uncommitted” in Democratic primaries are all driven, not by wide open borders, inflation, homelessness and store looting and other crime, etc., but by Democrats all over America withholding support from Biden because he sends armaments to Israel for its response to men, women and children hostage-holding Hamas in Gaza.  But such is the perception, and we must refute the injustice of blaming Israel.

So ask yourself, is Here and Now a most meaningful time to be Jewish?  And if so, join in acting upon it.