#1024 9/6/20 – Making the Jordan Valley Border Case to American Jews

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  I had two internet exchanges this week – one on Stu Bykofsky’s website with a fellow subscriber thereto who called President Trump a supporter of racists and anti-Semites, and one with a subscriber hereto who calls supporters like me of the Israeli claim to Judea-Samaria opponents of “reasonable compromise.” 

Whoever you’re going to vote for, it’s incumbent on all of us to refute claims Trump is anti-Semitic.  Jordan was “Eastern Palestine,” and its excision from the Mandate accomplished a reasonable to the Arabs compromise of Palestine between Arabs and Jews.   

This Week:  Making the Jordan Valley Border Case To American Jews

I had a couple Internet exchanges this week, one with a fellow subscriber to Stu Bykofsky’s site about whether Donald Trump (you know, That Man In The Whitehouse with a Jewish daughter, Jewish son-in-law and Jewish grandchildren) is among his other alleged faults “anti-Semitic,” and one with a most appreciated subscriber to this sometimes media watch whose Israel views (how should I put this?) are more representative than mine of those of our fellow American Jews.

But first a piece of unfinished business.  I devoted the past two of these weekly emails to a difference between Stu Bykofsky himself and me over his statement last month that “Israel has long built towns, called settlements, on the land that someday will be in a Palestinian state.”  On Stu’s site and in these emails, I disputed both the inevitability and desirability of that.  Stu’s statement appeared in his August 15 posting “Why Trump’s Peace Deal [between Israel and the United Arab Emirates] is B-I-G.”  For a full statement of Stu’s view, and the exchange I had with him there, go to stubykofsky.com and page down through his postings listings to that.  (Stu and I have “agreed to disagree” on Judea-Samaria’s future.  I commend stubykofsky.com to you as a place of insightful postings and often delightful comment exchanges on a range of timely topics.)

Is Trump Racist and Anti-Semitic?

Now, then, a Ms. Green commented on Stu’s posting Friday, “What Trump Means to Say About Law and Order.”  She began:  “Trump WANTS [emphasis original] to divide the country and support those who are racist and anti-Semitic.”  In a comment to Ms. Green’s comment, I took exception to that, citing Trump’s relationship with his Jewish immediate family members, his actions for Israel and moving statements of Hershel Walker and others at last month’s Republican convention.  A comment by another reader and quotations posted by Stu of what Trump actually said at Charlottesville, referenced by Ms. Green in a reply to me, followed.

Perception that the incumbent President of the United States wants to divide the country and supports those who are racist and anti-Semitic, if widely believed, will unfairly prejudice his reelection chances this fall, and those of us Jews who see him as anything but – irrespective of our individual views on the parties’ positions on the economy, law enforcement, the pandemic, etc. – need to openly state to fellow Americans that by us our President is not racist and anti-Semitic.

Making the Jordan Valley Border Case to American Jews

A component of “the two-state solution” on which a longtime subscriber to these weekly emails and I disagree is the term “mutually agreed.”  I understand “the two-state solution” as calling for a new western Palestine Arab state sharing a border with Israel along “the 1967 [i.e., 1949-drawn ceasefire] lines” with “mutually agreed” territorial swaps.  If changes to those lines, which unchanged would leave Israel without historic Jerusalem and militarily indefensible, are not mutually agreed, which they won’t be, the border will be those 1949-drawn ceasefire lines.

My subscriber divorces “mutually agreed” from “1967 lines.”  He puts aside a two-state solution with borders based on 1967 lines as something that simply will not come to pass in our time, and applies “mutually agreed” to someday talks sans starting lines.  He says:

     “What part of ‘mutually agreed’ do you continue not to understand?  I’ll let the Israelis decide what’s in their best interests.  If a hundred years from now they make a deal with pacifist Palestinian Arabs to create a Palestinian state on land that you say ‘we have to have,’ who am I (and who are you) to disagree?”

The difference between us here is that I regard “the two-state solution along the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps” not as a present day suggestion that won’t come to pass, but as a present day present threat.

But there are two further thoughts in a second email he sent me this week that I think highlight the main difference between “we have to have” Judea-Samaria Jews like me and the majority of American Jews.  My subscriber wrote:

     “So it’s clear.  You and Hamas/PA are both for a one state solution.  The difference is that Hamas/PA would kill all the Jews or expel them (to where, who knows?), whereas your one state would be apartheid, with Arabs having different rights than Jews.  What’s the likelihood of either to happen?  You and I both know: none.  It’s ok for you to rail against a two-state solution and against the vast majority of American Jews (and other Americans) who see it as a reasonable compromise.  But they’re being ‘reasonable.’ You’re not.

     “You should better spend your energy persuading liberal Jews (J-Street, etc.) that Israel doesn’t ‘occupy’ the disputed territories, that calling Judea and Samaria the ‘West Bank’ gives up Jews’ three millennia connection there, and, most importantly, that the Palestinian Arabs have no intention to compromise; they’ve rejected many, many offers, including one that would give them more than 95% of Judea and Samaria.

     “You are so committed to your absolutist view that, unfortunately, my email will fall on deaf ears.”

Ah, there’s the rub – my railing against a western Palestine two-state solution and against the vast majority of American Jews is an apartheid absolutist position.  But it’s not – not apartheid, and not even against a two-state solution.  On the contrary, it’s an assertion that a reasonable compromise, a 78-to-22% division of Palestine between Arabs and Jews, has already occurred.

But how to get this across to what my subscriber probably accurately called “the vast majority of American Jews”?   I think, beyond documenting Jews’ continuous post-biblical land of Israel homeland presence, by explaining

[a] that what became Jordan, with its Palestinian Arab majority, was as much a part of the Palestine Mandate as what became Israel;

[b] that the Mandate allowed Britain to “withhold” the Mandate’s provisions – reconstituting the Palestine Jewish national home with close settlement of Jews on the land – from the part of that Mandate east of the Jordan River, which Britain promptly did; and

[c] that this clause allowing withholding of the Mandate’s provisions east of the River excluded withholding its provisions west of the River.

But yeah, some smile and say, Jordan was never really really part of Palestine to begin with.  Not so.  The Introduction to one of the books in my Israel collection, East of the Jordan by Selah Merrill, Archeologist of the American Palestine Exploration Society, published in pre-Zionist 1881, explains that “most people, when they think of Palestine, give it the same narrow boundaries” as ancient Canaan, the oldest of all the names, which referred only to country west of the Jordan, so that “Eastern Palestine [capital E original, italics added] hardly comes into account.”  The Introduction continues, “And yet the historic associations belonging to the country east of the Jordan are rich and various,” and refers to the author’s “Typographical Notes on Eastern Palestine” [italics added] on the results of his explorations.  Eastern Palestine is part of Palestine and was not arbitrarily included in the Palestine Mandate.

Jordan has a Palestinian Arab majority, and if it’s not Democratic & Arab, it can be made so as a constitutional monarchy.  Is that original 78%-to- 22% favoring Arabs a less reasonable compromise of Palestine’s division between Arabs and Jews than for a second time dividing between Arabs and Jews the 22% of Palestine that its first division between Arabs and Jews left for the Jews?

Arabs living in a Judea-Samaria to which Israel applies homeland sovereignty will be non-citizen residents, having “the civil and religious rights” promised them in the Balfour Declaration.  Compare the rights of Christians and Jews living for centuries as “dhimmis” in Arab lands.

As for my subscriber’s other suggestion that I expend my energies persuading e.g. J Street not to say “West Bank,” I haven’t even succeeded, not for lack of trying, in getting Jonathan Tobin and Daniel Pipes to stop saying “West Bank.”  Still, I stick by our motto, phrased by Lee, “If you forfeit the language, you forfeit your history and heritage.”  There are a lot of American Jews this side of J Street who still need such persuading.