WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A book I’m reading argues that the UN’s 1947 partition of the 22% of the Palestine Mandate left from Britain’s lopping off of all-Arab Jordan was unfair to the Arabs because “Palestine was an Arab land.” We must make the case that the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, is and has always been Jewish, not Arab, that we never physically, as well as spiritually, abandoned that land. American Jewish advocates of again dividing our remaining 22% between Arabs and Jews are acting fatally unfairly to us.
Two-States, Shmoo-States: The Land of Israel Is Ours, Period
As usual, I’m reading a Jewish homeland history book, this one titled The Long War: Israel and the Arabs Since 1946 by historian J. Bowyer Bell. The book’s about two inches thick. I’m only a quarter-inch into it, but already I fundamentally disagree with the author.
In describing the United Nations’ 1947 debate over the Palestine partition resolution, Bell wrote that at the General Assembly special session on Palestine at Lake Success, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, in Ben-Gurion’s absence, “presented the case for the Jews with eloquence and passion.” The paragraph quoted by Bell cited the Jews’ sacrifices and military contributions in the World War, and said the Jewish people was “now rebuilding its national life in its ancient homeland.”
Author Bell then quoted the spokesman for the Arab Higher Committee, who “outlined the Arabs’ just claims and dissected the Zionist arguments.” Bell summarized the Arabs as arguing that “Palestine was in fact an Arab country, and it had a right [emphasis original] to be independent.” Bell judged that “to grant the Zionists’ aspirations would be a resuscitation of the impractical past” and would be “a violation of the right to [Arab] self-determination” that “seemed obvious to all but the muddle-headed.” Further: “It was obvious that all the arguments of the Jews – the economic briefs, the use of the refugee problem, and Balfour Declaration – were specious” (see pp. 38-40). After describing the partition resolution’s passage, Bell summed up: “The Arabs had a good cause, a true one, buttressed by all manner of argument, international law, and common sense” (p. 68).
Count me common-senseless. I dissent, not just from author J. Bowyer Bell, but as well from those on our side who in 1947 didn’t and today don’t make the case that the land of Israel, in which today’s Jewish state of Israel is that land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, is a Jewish homeland which we neither physically nor spiritually abandoned.
Where were the Arab “Palestinians” when the Jewish Israelites (who really were descended from Canaanites if the widely-held “indigenous origins” theory of Israelite origins is right) came back from fighting and losing their ancient kingdoms to the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, to take on Alexander’s Seleucid successors and finally Rome (63 and 37 BCE, 66-70 and 132-35 CE)?
Upon defeating Bar-Kochba in 135, the Romans did not exile Judaea’s surviving Jews. Continuously unearthed Roman-Byzantine era synagogue remains and other evidences of openly Jewish life have been found all over the land. Organized homeland Jewish religious institutions constructed first the Mishnah and then Palestinian Talmud. The Roman overlords recognized the Patriarch as head of the homeland Yishuv until the fifth century, and the Sanhedrin continued after that. The scholar Gedaliah Alon, in The Jews In Their Land in the Talmudic Age (pp, 6-12), thoroughly documented the subservience of Diaspora Jews, including in Babylonia, to Jewish authorities in the homeland throughout the Roman-Byzantine period.
In 614, self-mustered battalions of twenty thousand or more homeland Jews fought alongside the invading Persians against the hated Romans’ Byzantine heirs. The Persians had “promised the Jews self-government within the framework of the Persian Empire, the rebuilding of Jerusalem as a Jewish city, and the restoration of the Temple” (Ben-Gurion, ed., The Jews In Their Land, p. 198). On recovering the land from the Persians, the Byzantines in their final years went on a Jew-slaughtering rampage reminiscent of the Romans in defeating the Jewish revolts.
The homeland Jews, “who regarded the [630’s] Islamic conquest and the replacement of the Byzantine-Christian rule by the Arab one as the beginning of the redemption of Israel” (Tal, Whose Jerusalem?, p. 65), materially aided the Islamic invaders. Omar, “wishing to repay the Jews for their help in the Muslim conquest of Palestine,” broke the Christian ban on Jews living in Jerusalem, over “obstinate” Christian objection. Bahat, Twenty Centuries of Jewish Life in The Holy Land: The Forgotten Generations, p. 24). There is abundant evidence of organized Jewish life in the country during the successive foreign Muslim Ommayad, Abbasid and Fatimid dynasties’ rule. Bahat (pp. 30-31) includes a map showing a hundred Abbasid period homeland Jewish communities. (And see Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, pp. 94-103).
In 1099, when the European Christian Crusaders crashed upon Palestine’s shores as a storm out of the West, “they found an Arabic-speaking population, composed of a dozen races (apart from Jews and Druzes), practicing five versions of Islam and eight of heterodox Christianity” (Katz, Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine. P. 112). “There were Jewish communities all over the country. Fifty of them are known to us [a millennium later]; they include Jerusalem, Tiberias, Ramleh, Ashkelon, Caesarea, and Gaza” (Katz, p. 90, Bahat, p. 37).
“A contemporary Crusader account of the conquest of Jerusalem acknowledges the valor of the Jewish fighters: ‘And here, in front of us, were the foreigners, Jew, Turk, and Arab, fighting for their lives with slingstones, with catapults, with fire and venom . . . and when the end came upon the foreigners, they withdrew from one battlefront, only to find a second battlefront facing them. And though there was terror on all sides, none put down his sword; the Turk, the Arab, and the Jew were among the fallen. The Jew is the last to fall.’” (Katz, p. 90)
And not in Jerusalem only. Katz (p. 90): “The Jews almost single-handedly defended Haifa against the Crusaders, holding out in the besieged town for a whole month.” Albert of Aachen: “Haifa … which the Jews defended with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians” (quoted by Bahat, p.37). And:
“’Apart from a few places in the south, we have no information about Jewish participation in the defense of other Palestinian towns; but there is no reason to suppose that Jerusalem and Haifa were exceptional places.” (Ben-Gurion, ed., The Jews in Their Land, p. 215)
The Crusaders, like the Byzantines before them and the Romans before them, slaughtered untold numbers of homeland Jews. The Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudula counted communities of homeland Jews, but only hundreds in some places and less than hundreds in others. Bahat (p. 40) attributed this to “the destruction of entire communities by the First Crusade, half a century before Benjamin’s visit.” Peters, in From Time Immemorial (p. 152), cites the Crusades authority Runciman that the Crusaders’ massacres had greatly reduced the Jewish population. But the wonder is not that Benjamin counted few Jews, but that he counted any at all.
Mongols’ massacres of everyone followed in the Crusaders’ wake. In 1260, the Turk-Circassian Mamluks defeated the Mongols and added Palestine to their domains. We know a lot about the homeland Jewish Yishuv during the two following centuries of Mamluk misrule. My book (pp. 115-118) has a fifteenth century timeline, compiled from several sources, of Jewish life in Jerusalem, and cites multiple authorities on Jews in the north and south of the land.
Then came four hundred years of Palestine’s benighted misrule by the Ottoman Turks (1517-1917), who managed to make the Mamluks seem enlightened. As famously told by Mark Twain and others, the Turks drove Palestine’s population down to its lowest of all recorded times. “Palestine was gradually emptied of people between 1512 and 1800. The lowpoint was probably reached in 1850, when estimates varied between fifty and one hundred thousand.” DeHaas, History of Palestine: The Last 2000 Years, p. 39; see also Katz, citing sources, pp. 108-109.
But the homeland Jews persevered through the Turkish rule centuries, in their four holy cities – Jerusalem, Safad, Tiberias and Hebron – and elsewhere in the land. British archeologist Warren wrote in the 1860’s that Jerusalem’s Jews, already again the plurality and soon the since-existing majority, weren’t ghost-like penurious mourners of an ancient past but commercial and industrial people of the land. An 1859 British consular document: “The Mohammedans of Jerusalem are less fanatical than in many other places, owing to the circumstances of their numbers scarcely exceeding one-quarter of the population” (Peters, p. 198). In the late nineteenth century, before the Zionists’ came, Jerusalem’s Jews led the breakout from the stifling Old City into the sunlight of modern times, founding schools, agricultural sites and beyond-the-walls residential communities. It was to an already reviving Yishuv that the Zionists came.
At the end of his chapter (p. 68) on “The Struggle Over Partition,” author J. Bowyer Bell gave the reader his view of why the Arabs, unlike the Jews, would not agree to partitioning western Palestine between Arabs and Jews:
“The Arabs had a good cause, a true one, buttressed by all manner of argument, international law and common sense. They can hardly be faulted for hewing to their beliefs…. [M]ost Arab leaders had no desire to jettison the true cause …. Rather, they shared a dedication to the truth of the proposition that Palestine was an Arab country.”
Those of us who reject “the truth of the proposition” that Palestine west of the River, the land of Israel, is or ever was “an Arab country” share our own dedication that it never ceased to be the Jewish people’s homeland. Neither its small mid-twentieth century plurality of Arabs over Jews, nor its history of native and foreign rule turned it “Arab.”
Population: Bevin himself called Jews one-third of western Palestine’s 1947 population – 600,000 Jews vs. 1.2 million Arabs (quoted by Bell himself, The Long War, p. 36). Katz makes a strong case in Battleground (p. 23) that there were only 800,000 – 900,000 Arabs, raising the Jewish percentage from 33 to 40%, but even 2/3 Arab is hardly a homogeneous population of Arabs. Last week I stated that but for Turk, German and British anti-Jewish actions in the twentieth century, western Palestine’s 1947 Jewish population would have been very much higher. Add to that the massacring of homeland Jews over millennia by Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders and Mongols. So there being a few hundred thousand (that’s all!) more Arabs than Jews there in 1947 doesn’t make western Palestine, which had been virtually emptied of population just a century earlier, “an Arab country” at all.
Rule: Palestinian Arabs haven’t ruled western Palestine (except de facto Gaza these days) ever. Jews have been sovereign three times – ancient Judah and Israel, Hasmonean (Maccabeean) Judaea, and today’s Israel.
As for equitable division of Palestine between Arabs and Jews, by the two determinative criteria – population and land – Palestine has been already equitably divided between Arabs and Jews.
Arab Palestine: Eastern Palestine, today’s Jordan, was 78% of the Palestine Mandate, and its population majority is Palestinian Arab – i.e., descended from Arabs living in the Palestine Mandate, including the part that became Israel. If Jordan today isn’t adequately “Democratic & Arab,” making it a constitutional monarchy would make it so.
Jewish Palestine: The land of Israel became the Jewish homeland three thousand years ago, and we never physically or spiritually abandoned it as such. The majority of Israel’s population today is descended from Old Yishuv and Israel-absorbed indigenously Middle-eastern Jews displaced in the Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict. European Jews may have thought themselves “Europeans of the Mosaic persuasion,” but Europe’s majority populations never considered them such, and Jews have always been dhimmis in Arab lands. The entirety of the land of Israel, the 22% of Palestine west of the Jordan, has a physically natural defensible border and the Jewish holy places of historic Jerusalem. We have to have it, and are historically and legally (San Remo and the Mandate) entitled to it.
Jewish advocates, mostly most of American Jews, of surrendering the Jewish homeland’s strategically indispensable Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and historic Jerusalem in a “two-state” second partition of Palestine would render the Jewish homeland state militarily indefensible and Jewishly meaningless. Self-respecting American Jews must oppose it.