WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A fortnight ago, journalist Stu Bykofsky wrote that Jewish communities in Judea-Samaria are on land “that someday will be in a Palestinian state.” I devoted last week’s #1022 to an open appeal to Stu to join in advocating the stronger Jewish homeland claim to Judea-Samaria or, failing that, to call this part of the land of Israel “disputed.” Stu graciously replied, standing on his position but giving his reasons, based, he says, on Reality. I disagree, but stand on seeking what Reality ought in justice to be.
This Week: Finding the Meat in a Stu Stew
A fortnight ago, Philly journalist Stu Bykofsky, in one of his frequent postings on his website, stubykofsky.com, wrote, in commenting on the Israeli-UAE agreement, that
“Israel has long built towns, called settlements, on the land that someday will be in a Palestinian state.”
In last week’s #1022, I took exception to this statement of Stu’s, arguing in an open appeal to him that the Jewish people has the strongest claim, by history and international treaty, to the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, and that to have a Jewish homeland state that’s militarily defensible and Jewishly meaningful, we have to have the entirety of that land of Israel, including its Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and historic Jerusalem. And that leaves Palestinian Arabs with 78% of the Palestine Mandate, Jordan, where they are the population majority. So I pleaded with Stu that if he can’t join us in claiming that Judea-Samaria is ours, at least call it disputed, not inevitably “land that someday will be in a Palestinian state.”
Stu replied:
“I think the deal between Israel and the UAE is a Big Deal – the first move toward peace in a quarter century. It may encourage other Arab states to step forward.
“I also believe any attempt by Israel to ‘annex’ in any way the so-called West Bank would be a tragedy for the demographic reasons presented in my column.
“Yes, the Torah says Judea and Samaria are Jewish, but the Torah is not seated at the U.N. That land has as much chance of being returned to Israel as Manhattan has of going back to Native Americans.
“In the long run, I think Jerusalem can be the capital of two states, with Israel in charge, and I do not approve of return to the ‘suicide lines’ that make Israel vulnerable.”
First, my appreciation to Stu for engaging in this calm conversation in which we disagree, though not quite so deeply and heatedly perhaps as in exchanges between me and full believers, as a former U.S. ambassador to Israel a few months ago put it, in “a two-state solution along the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed land swaps.” It’s through calm conversations that participants come to identify the most meaningful differences between them. So let’s seek the meat in this Stu-stew over Judea-Samaria being “land that someday will be in a Palestinian state.”
Yes, Jews as a people see the Hand of God in history, but it’s in that history as a fact that I for one base our people’s history-based claim to our homeland of Israel. We’ve been there, sovereign three times now with a Jerusalem capital, over the past 3,000 years. We’ve defended that land and our presence in it against Assyrians, Babylonians, Seleucid heirs of Alexander the Great, Romans four times (63 and 37 BCE, 66-70 and 132-135 CE), the Romans’ Byzantine heirs, the European Christian Crusaders, and in our own time in three full-blown wars (1948, 1967 and 1973) and repeated lesser fights against Arabs. We weren’t “gone” for eighteen hundred years between Hadrian and Herzl. Historian Parkes rightly avowed that our continuous tenacious post-biblical presence wrote our time’s Zionists’ “real title deeds.” By contrast, Palestinian Arabs have not ruled the land of Israel, including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, ever.
The Jewish people is not seeking Judea-Samaria “being returned to Israel,” so the analogy of Native Americans getting back Manhattan (in the unlikely event that they’d want what’s left of it) is inapplicable. Israel has Judea-Samaria, and has had it now for more than half-a-century. Jordan (Transjordan before it invaded the western part of Palestine in 1948) had zero historical claim to Judea-Samaria, and before Jordan its ruler was Britain as trustee under an international Mandate recognizing the Jewish people’s historic connection with Palestine, providing for reconstituting the Jewish people’s national home there, and calling for close settlement of Jews on the land, with optional exclusion east of the River. The ruler before that, for four hundred years, was non-Arab Turks; before that for over two hundred years non-Arab Mamluks; before that European Christian Crusaders; before that Ommayad, Abbasid and Fatimid foreign Muslim dynasties (the only Arab rule period except Jordan in part 1948-67); before that the Romans-Byzantines who’d defeated in four wars the land’s Jews. (But there is a legendary analogy of Jews with Native Americans. Sitting Bull came to Shamir, when he was Premier, in a dream and said to him, “Yitzhak, let me tell you about Land For Peace.”)
“’Annex’ in any way” is an inapposite term, applying as it does to a state seizing land belonging de jure to another state. “Apply sovereignty” is the accurate term. But the demographic reasons which Stu cited for what he called this “tragedy” are more real. It would present Israel a “Hobson’s choice,” Stu wrote in his column – give Palestinian Arabs the vote and eventually have the Jewish state-ness of Israel voted out of existence, or deny them vote and get called “apartheid.” Israel gets called “apartheid” already, of course, but Palestinian Arabs have a homeland in Palestine already, Jordan, where they are the majority, which can be if not already Democratic & Arab.
Abba Eban, not a Likudnik, called the 1949 ceasefire lines “Auschwitz lines.” Allon and Rabin, among Israel’s greatest military leaders and that’s saying something, both recognized that only a Jordan River security border, with the Judea-Samaria hill country ridge between the Jewish and Arab states, could provide Israel security, and the fact is that an Arab state situated in the Judea-Samaria hills visually overlooking Israel’s nine-miles-wide in the heavily-populated lowland coastal plain middle would be suicidal, enticingly inviting invasion. An Israel comprising the land of Israel, 22% of the Palestine Mandate, less than one percent of “the Arab Middle East,” including a Palestinian Arab Palestine state, is not what’s mockingly called “Greater Israel,” but a far Lesser Israel than the Palestine Mandate initially encompassed.
Which brings us to the nub of the difference between Stu Bykofsky and me. I agree with Stu completely that the Israel-UAE agreement, if it indeed reaches reality, is “B-I-G,” both in itself and as a potential precedent for wider Israel-Arab state normalization. But not bigger than Israel having defensible meaningful borders, and this is mutually exclusive with a new inside-the-land-of-Israel, western Palestine, Arab state.
Stu – given his website motto of “Reality determines my political positions, not vice versa” – sees as inevitable the land of Israel’s Judea-Samaria hill country heartland being “land that someday will be in a Palestinian state.” I disagree with Stu on the inevitability of such someday Reality.
But I determine my political positions not on what Reality is or someday necessarily will be, but on what – by me as a Jew born in America during the Holocaust and among those upon whom Ben-Gurion called to stand by Israel in the struggle for fulfillment of the Dream of Generations for its sovereign redemption, in fairness to us Jews, kicked around Christendom and in dhimmitude the Realm of Islam for almost two thousand years – Reality in justice to us ought to be. I say that even if it sounds so far from Reality at the time that I say it, that as with the convener of the First Zionist Congress writing in his diary that if he said aloud in 1897 that at Basel he’d founded the Jewish State, people would laugh. So I commenced my open appeal to Journalist Bykofsky last week: “Hi Stu, I take my marching orders from Herzl….”