WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Last week I quoted the comment I appended to journalist Stu Bykofsky’s column on the Israel-UAE agreement, in which I said it must not permanently block Israel applying Judea-Samaria sovereignty. But a statement of Stu’s on the inevitability of “a Palestinian state” needs a response of its own. Here goes:
This Week: An Open Appeal to a Journalist To Support Jewish Claim to Judea-Samaria
Stu Bykofsky, Journalist, formerly 47 years with the Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily News, has a website, stubykofsky.com, on which several times a week he posts his brief articles on current events, inviting comments. He emails new postings’ links to his subscribers (I’m one). Stu’s motto, at the top of his site, is “Reality determines my political positions, not vice versa.” Last week (8/15/20), Stu posted “Why Trump’s Peace Deal [between Israel and the United Arab Emirates] is B-I-G,” an importance assessment in which I conditionally concur, but in which he wrote:
“Israel has long built towns, called settlements, on the land that someday will be in a Palestinian state.”
I posted a comment, also included in my last week’s #1021, that Israel’s UAE deal must not come at the cost of Israel surrendering the Jews’ history and international treaty-based Jewish homeland claim to Judea-Samaria. Yet such is the demand of the United Nations in UNSC 2334, which applies as well to historic Jerusalem, and that of the establishment institutions of American Jews, including the Reform and Conservative religious movements (“two-state solution” with borders that “hew precisely” to “the 1967 borders” save for any agreed “territorial adjustments”). Such a Jerusalem-less ghetto sliver of Palestine would be militarily indefensible and Jewishly meaningless. I also had a private email exchange with Stu over this posting.
But given what I see as a great need for grassroots American Jews to support most Israelis in rejecting a western Palestine – i.e., inside the land of Israel – Arab state, I can’t let it go at that. A journalist whose grassroots followers actively comment on his frequent postings, often followed by responses by him, influences his readers’ views, and it’s worth a shot at appealing to such a journalist at least not to proclaim inevitability of the land of Israel’s Judea-Samaria hill country heartland becoming a new, never before existing western Palestine Arab state, and if it’s in him actively to advocate the Jewish homeland claim to Judea-Samaria. Here goes:
Hi, Stu,
“I take my marching orders from Herzl.” I put that in quotes because I’d said it before, to the board of governors and members of the fraternal order Brith Sholom when I had the honor, years ago now, to become what once really had been its “national president,” for the, alas decrepit, ninety-eighth and ninety-ninth years of its existence. (Brith Sholom’s still there, I think. At least, they annually bill me for dues. BTW, we had a hell of a party the next year, celebrating our Hundredth. The next president did all the work. I just spoke first – “Well, we made it!” – and then drank as much beer as I could.)
When Herzl wrote what even Dr. Weizmann called his partly naïve little book, The Jewish State, and convened in 1897 the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, you can bet his motto wasn’t “Reality Determines My Political Positions.” The 1897 Reality was that western Palestine as the Jewish State was but a dream. Indeed, when Herzl wrote in his diary that month that “At Basel, I founded the Jewish State,” he added that if he said that aloud “everyone would laugh.” But he added to that, that in five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone would perceive it. Herzl, who died too young in 1904, didn’t live to see everyone perceive it, but fifty years from 1897, with the UN’s adoption in 1947 of its Palestine partition resolution, everyone did.
Respectfully, I suggest as a motto one which personally immerses its bearer in what Holmes called “the action and passion of the events of his time” in pursuing what Reality justly should be. Ben-Gurion, in my lifetime, called on the Jews of the world to stand by Israel in the struggle for fulfillment of the Dream of Generations for the Jewish homeland’s sovereign redemption. Herzl put it this way: “If you will it, it is no dream.”
Judea and Samaria being “land that someday will be in a Palestinian state” isn’t even current Reality, but motto-shmotto, my plea to you is don’t summarily dismiss the substantial case of the vast majority of Israeli Jews and, alas, just minority American Jews like me that the Jewish people has a stronger homeland claim to the land of Israel, western Palestine including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, Jewish Quarter, City of David, archeological ground zero) than have Arabs. Be an advocate for the Jewish people’s homeland claim (see history on horseback below), but if that’s too far for you, call Judea-Samaria disputed, not definitively “land that someday will be in a Palestinian state.”
The Jews’ biblical era history, summarized in the little book that I wrote, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, I gave you a copy of one night a few years ago outside your place in the rain, historically happened. As I wrote in my book, you can take contemporary enemies’ kings, including the one who inscribed on a stone a reference to “the House of David,” word for it. And we never left. Today’s State of Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea – every ruler in between having been a foreign empire invader, and mostly non-Arab at that. Palestinian Arabs have never ruled Palestine ever, but in the past 3,000 years Jews have had three native states there – Israel & Judah, Hasmonean (Maccabean) Judaea and modern Israel. all Jerusalem-capitaled. Read my chapters on Jews’ homeland-claiming presence during the Romans-Byzantines, briefly Persians, foreign-based Muslim dynasties, Crusaders, Mamluks and Turks. Historian Parkes stated succinctly: the continuous tenacious homeland-claiming presence of the Yishuv all through the post-biblical centuries, in spite of every discouragement, wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds” (Parkes, Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine, p. 266).
The League of Nations Palestine Mandate, adopted along with others by the UN, recognized the Jewish people’s historic connection with Palestine, encompassing today’s Israel and Jordan, and provided for reconstituting therein the Jewish national home with close settlement of Jews on the land. That Mandate allowed Britain to withhold its provisions from the part of it east of the Jordan, which Britain did in creating Jordan, but that’s all.
So the Jewish homeland including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem doesn’t leave Palestinian Arabs out in the cold. Jordan, in which Palestinian Arabs are the population majority, was 78% of the Palestine Mandate. Make its Hashemite Arab king a constitutional monarch and there you have it – Palestinian Arab Palestine, Democratic & Arab. (And, btw, Israel absorbed more indigenous Middle Eastern Jews displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands – whose descendants today form the majority of Israel’s population – than Arabs left tiny Israel.)
We have a strong case for Judea-Samaria being ours and not Arabs’. If it’s not in you to join with us in advocating it, don’t join our adversaries in summarily dismissing it.
Best,
Jerry
PS: If you’d like to respond to this, I’ll run it next week.