Fellow Grassroots American Jews: If You’re Enamored of “The Two-State Solution,” This Week We’ve Got To Talk Mamaloshen
There are expressions in Yiddish, that mother-tongue honed to a nuance nicety by our never-at-home ancestors kicked around the European continent for centuries from one begrudged ghetto to another, that really do “lose something in the translation.” So here are two kosher invocations of one of its terms.
#1: A long time ago, in an occupation far far away, I was charged with collecting for a struggling manufacturing concern outside Philadelphia some thousands of dollars owed to it by an even-more-struggling textile outfit in Brooklyn. The latter’s controller, a Mr. Goldstein, had written to creditors that their already long overdue invoices would be paid in xxx days. My guys couldn’t wait xxx days. I called the controller, and our conversation went something like this:
“I told all of you that your invoices would be paid in xxx days. Can’t you understand English?”
“I don’t want to speak with you in English.”
“In what language would you like to speak, Mr. Verlin?”
“Mamaloshen.”
“The check is in the mail.”
And it was.
#2: If you’re a grassroots American Jew even a little bit enamored of “The Two-State Solution,” I won’t insult you by plagiarizing a plagiarizer that “you ain’t Jewish,” but there were two articles on the internet this week about which we’ve got to talk mamaloshen, not through a mask muffled. In combination, these two articles should scare the shit out of you.
The first is a Thursday (5/21/20) posting on The EttingerReport.com, Israel’s Control of Judea & Samaria – a Prerequisite for Security, by the Ambassador. It leads off:
“The mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) – 3,000 feet above the Jordan Valley and 2,000 feet above Israel’s heavily populated coastal plain – constitute the ‘Golan Heights’ of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, the key north-south transportation artery highway 6, critical commercial and defense infrastructures and 80% of Israel’s population.”
It goes on that “Israel’s control of the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria – rather than a Palestinian state – is a pivotal national security prerequisite”; that “Israel’s national security cannot be based on peace accords, which could be as fragile as the regimes that conclude them”; that in 1973 it was the Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula that gave Israel [nine miles wide in the lowland middle under the old 1949 armistice lines] the 48 hours needed to deploy the reserves constituting 70% of its armed forces to throw back the Syrian-Egyptian surprise attack; that “the more advanced the military technologies of one’s enemies, the higher the importance of one’s high grounds to minimize terrorism and fend off swift unexpected military attacks”; and that from an American standpoint, Israel’s “control over the towering mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria” not only bolsters its own national security but is “a major force-multiplier to US national security and all pro-US Arab countries.” Ettinger concludes:
“A Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria would transform Israel from a national security producer to a consumer of national security; from a security asset of the US to a liability; from a deterring entity to a most vulnerable entity, plagued by unprecedented terrorism in its soft belly of Jerusalem and the densely populated coastal plain.”
Amb. Ettinger’s dire warning does not stand alone. British Col. Kemp and many others have voiced it as well.
One part of one sentence in that second article on the internet this week, co-authored by Daniel Shapiro, US Ambassador to Israel from 2011 to 2017, in the Times of Israel on Monday (5/18/20), Democrats’ Stand on Annexation Poses a Dilemma for Israel, says enough:
“Support for a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps remains a consensus policy within the Democratic Party ….”
There are three points that I would make this week, speaking mamaloshen, to you American Jewish grassroots supporters of that “two-state solution.”
#1 – Those of us like me who oppose that “two-state solution based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps” don’t just say we have to have Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, which indeed we do, but that they belong to us, that they’re intrinsic, indeed core, parts of our Jewish homeland, that they’re ours. And Palestinian Arabs aren’t being left out in the cold. Seventy-eight percent of the Palestine Mandate is Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan. If Palestinian Arabs aren’t in charge of Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan, the fix is to make Jordan “Democratic & Arab,” not to once again divide between Arabs and Jews that 22% of the Palestine Mandate, with its Jewish national home, that its first division between Arabs and Jews left for us Jews.
#2 – Those of us who like me are Jewish Americans of the Republican persuasion aren’t recommending that you switch to the GOP. There are too many American policy differences between us. We agree with Trump that if you don’t have borders you don’t have a country, on the super-importance to America of energy independence and manufacturing. Many of us believe, think about it, that it’s abortion that’s the abominable crime against nature. Stay in the Dems and fight against the consensus on that Jewish homeland-halving “two-state solution” that would leave the Jewishness-meaningless indefensible lowland half to us Jews.
#3 – The sad fact is that our American Jewish communal leadership – the Reform and Conservative movements, rabbis and all, AIPAC [!] and other of our institutions – have abdicated leadership of our community in standing for a secure and Jewishly meaningful Jewish homeland of Israel. We grassroots are on our own on this one. But don’t abdicate also.