WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: So this week, Israelis commemorated the 72nd anniversary of the Jewish homeland’s renewed independence. The struggle is still going on. I suggest two ways we grassroots American Jews can play a miniscule but personally meaningful part.
Commemorating Israel’s 72nd: Don’t Just Stand There, DO Something
Back when I was a little kid commencing my public education at a wonderful place called The Henry School, my father, “Uncle Max” to my friends, bought me an encyclopedia set called The World Book. The books’ bright red and blue covers were striking. They’re still striking on my bookshelves today. Many years later, my younger son Max came to me at an impasse in doing his “Sunday School” homework: “There’s something wrong with your World Books.” “What’s wrong with my World Books?” “The State of Israel’s not in your World Books.”
In commemorating this week the seventy-second anniversary of modern Israel’s independence, reflect for a moment on the significance of that monumental Jewish history event – fulfillment of the Dream of Generations – having occurred – make that occurring – in our time. I have, well, at least some of my collection of Jewish history books arranged by subject on their shelves – among them, those on Israel’s 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 wars. But this is of course artificial. These were just battles. Today’s State of Israel has fought only one war, its War of Independence, and it is still being fought.
Round one didn’t end in a borders-drawing peace treaty between Arabs and Jews, but with zigzagging ceasefire lines snaking through western Palestine, even Jerusalem itself, expressly declared in their defining document not to be political borders. They left Israel sans historic Jerusalem and nine miles wide in the lowland middle, perilous artificial boundaries so insecure that, as a Six Day War Israeli intelligence colonel put it in an article quoted in Mission Survival (p. 446), that they enticingly “constituted an invitation to aggression.” Every Jew in the world stood straighter and relieved of Second Holocaust fear in 1967 when Israel, surrounded on its frontiers by marshaled armies of enemies shrieking for its destruction, overcame them in a lightning war that after eighteen hundred years made the boundaries of a Jewish state and the historic Jewish homeland coextensive. The Old City with its Jewish Quarter, Temple Mount and Western Wall, the City of David and the Judea-Samaria hill country heartland with its defensible natural borders were back after almost two millennia in a Jewish-ruled homeland.
But today, a half-century after that incredible war that redeemed the heart of our homeland, it’s not just Israel’s Arab adversaries, but the United Nations, European Union and, alas, majority of American Jews [!], led by our “communal leaders,” who are aggressively calling for Israeli withdrawal back to those perilous, Jewish holy places-less, military ceasefire lines of 1949 – borders that “hew precisely” to “the 1967 borders,” save for any agreed-in-writing “territorial adjustments,” as America’s Reform and Conservative religious movements along with some other American Jewish groups shamefully put it last year.
If our fellow American Jews’ joining, against the will of most Israelis, in seeking to create, inside the land of Israel, “a Palestinian state” – as though Palestinian Arab majority Jordan in 78% of the Palestine Mandate is not a Palestinian Arab state – disturbs you, here are two ways you can meaningfully commemorate the seventy-second anniversary this week of our homeland’s renewed independence.
Append a Comment to Our Jewish Media Articles that Use Delegitimizing Words
I began these weekly emails a thousand and six weeks ago to protest the mainstream western media’s malportrayal of Israel through misleading delegitimizing perspectives and terms. This week, far from the first time, I encountered a Jewish news source doing just that. There exists in our world today, in which not just encyclopedias but newspapers are accessed on-line, a vehicle for contesting what they say that’s more powerful than the old only sometimes published, always published later, letters “to the editor” – i.e., to the editor’s readers.
That tool is “comments” appended directly to internet articles by those articles’ readers, accessible in time and place immediately to subsequent readers. This week I appended one to a Times of Israel (“ToI”) article titled “West Bank Annexation Not Contingent on Palestinian State, US Officials Emphasize.”
[a] “Annexation”: The article’s title itself, referencing “annexation,” repeated in the sub-head, lede and elsewhere in the article text, is delegitimizing. Definition #1, from the Encarta Dictionary, if you pick “All Reference Books” in the thesaurus lookup of “annexation” in Microsoft Word, is “to take over territory and incorporate it into another political entity, e.g., a country or state.” Those of us who believe Jews have homeland equity in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem by history and San Remo and the Mandate – e.g., me, Bibi and Trump – use the term “apply Israeli sovereignty,” not “annexation.”
Indeed, neither the US Embassy spokesperson nor Netanyahu himself used “annexation” in the direct quotes of them in ToI’s own article. Both used apply “sovereignty.” (It reminded me of the American media incessantly telling readers that Bush’s “roadmap” called on Palestinian Arabs “to rein in militants” when that document used “terrorism” over and over and “militancy” not at all.)
ToI here quoted the Embassy spokesman: “As we have made consistently clear, we are prepared to recognize Israeli actions to extend Israeli sovereignty and the application of Israeli law ….” It quoted Bibi: “And President Trump pledged to recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Jewish communities there [Judea-Samaria] and in the Jordan Valley.”
[b] “Judea-Samaria” as “the West Bank’s Biblical Name”: Times of Israel further denigrated what Bibi said by giving his “Judea-Samaria” reference western mainstream media mistreatment. ToI: “’Three month ago, the Trump peace plan recognized Israel’s rights in all of Judea and Samaria,’ Netanyahu said Sunday, referring to the West Bank by its biblical name….”
Yes, “Judea” and “Samaria” are Hebrew-origin biblical names, but they are not just biblical names. They remained in use all through the centuries, evidenced by maps and documents, including in the United Nations’ own Palestine partition resolution of CE 1947: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….”
[c] “West Bank”: The name “West Bank” was coined, post-invasion, by Jordan in 1950, for the same reason the Romans had renamed Judaea as Palestine in 135, to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews. “Judea and Samaria” is no more a quaint name for “the West Bank” than “Temple Mount” is a quaint name for “Haram al Sharif,” or “Jerusalem” for “al Quds.” A Jewish newspaper, not least an Israeli one, ought not knock Jewish connection-connoting names of Jewish homeland places in use for thousands of years as some Jews’, including the Jewish state’s premier’s, archaic alternatives to such places’ new de-judaizing names.
[d] “a Palestinian state”: The ToI article’s lede uses the term “a Palestinian state,” implying that at present a Palestinian Arab state does not exist. But one does. Jordan comprises 78% of the Palestine Mandate, with its call for reconstituting in Palestine the Jewish national home, and a big majority of Jordan’s citizens are or are descendants of Arabs who lived in what are today Israel or Jordan during the long struggle over Palestine between Arabs and Jews. References in Jewish newspapers to a proposed inside-the-land-of-Israel “Palestinian state” should say “a second Palestinian Arab majority state.”
Take On 2334 in Drawing Democrats’ Platform
Understand clearly what UN Security Council Resolution 2334, adopted in the final days of the Obama-Biden administration, clearly said. It didn’t declare “the West Bank” and “East Jerusalem” (Temple Mount, Western Wall, Jewish Quarter and all) to be subject to negotiations between Arabs and Jews. It declared every inch over the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines to be “occupied Palestinian territory” in which the Jewish people has zero homeland equity, period. The Security Council
“1. Reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace ….”
“3. Underlines that it will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations ….” [emphasis added a little]
I am not asking those of you who are Democrats to switch to the Republicans. Speaking for myself only, for multiple reasons I believe it better for both the Dems and GOP, and the US and Israel, if you didn’t. One of those reasons is that it seems to me likely that whoever’s the Democratic candidate, the Sanders-led liberal wing of the party will have a substantial say, not just in the platform but in the party’s position on the Arabs and Israel. Do what you can at least to state its platform view on Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, not as 2334’s “Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem,” but as “subject to negotiations between Jews and Arabs,” if not affirmatively recognizing, as does “the Deal of the Century,” Jewish homeland equity in these core parts of the Jewish people’s homeland of Israel.
Bottom Line
In his introduction to Unsettled: An Anthropology of The Jews, American Professor Melvin Konner wrote of his first trip to Israel: “Near the end of that for me momentous trip, I was walking atop the Masada fortress when a fellow traveler asked me why I looked so pained. ‘This is the greatest adventure in Jewish history,’ I said – meaning modern Israel – ‘and I am not part of it.’”
I too once walked atop Masada (it was a hot day and I was glad for the water bottle they gave me as I began my trek up). It is, looking down from the top at the still extant remains of that long ago Roman years-long siege of the Great Revolt’s last stand of the Jews, an exceptionally moving historical scene for a Jew. My visit was during a time of heightened “militant” Palestinian Arabs’ attacks on Israelis. I remember at Masada’s top encountering a group of young Israeli school children, accompanied by two of their fathers with guns. I asked, “Even here?” “Even here.” That shouldn’t have to be, not there, especially there, but not anywhere in the land of Israel, the Jewish people’s homeland, for Jews.
But I think that Prof. Konner was wrong. We can play a tiny but personally meaningful part, lend a hand to that greatest adventure in Jewish history taking place in our time, especially given a majority of American Jews’ joinder, against the will of Israelis, in the drive to halve the land of Israel, leaving the less meaningful, less defensible half for its Jews. This week, I’ve suggested two ways – fight Jews’ own use of terminology devised to delegitimize that homeland of ours, e.g., through internet article reader comments, and try to keep in effect what liberal Prof. Dershowitz rightly deems as essential, bipartisan US support in a hostile world for our Jewish state, in the entirety of its homeland, including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem.