A New Year Sober Look At Where We Now Stand
L’Shanah Tova, You Who Put Up With Me Weekly, not least those of you who email me now and again with views different from mine on, e.g., “the two-state solution.” Let’s take a look and see how close we agree on where our people and homeland now stand, as this New Year begins, in our relations with others. It’s a mixed bag, as I see it.
Arabs: One of the three “most delegitimizing” anti-Jewish homeland expressions I cited in last week’s #1025 was Arabs and others calling Israel “the Zionist entity.” I wrote that they do this not just to avoid calling Israel “Israel,” but to date our Jewish connection to the land of Israel, western Palestine, to the late nineteenth century-begun Zionist movement.
Of all the Earth’s other peoples we’d most like to see accept our people as for three millennia and longer indigenous to the Mideast, my choice would be the people residing in the lands surrounding our homeland, those whom the media smilingly call Israel’s Arab “neighbors.” If I could title an agreement between Israel and an Arab neighbor, even one so far to the east that it’s at the other far end of the neighborhood, I think I’d call that agreement not “Israel-United Arab Emirates Agreement,” but “the Abraham Accords.” Whatever comes of it as time and tensions roll on, that’s a start that says something.
Europe: The Jewish Press reported this week (9/15/20, Chancellor Merkel: Jews Don’t Feel Safe in Germany) that Angela Merkel just told the seventieth anniversary of the Central Council For Jews in Germany that anti-Semitism “never disappeared” from Germany and that today this scourge is “more visible and without restriction.” We didn’t need the German Chancellor to tell us seventy-five years after the Holocaust that anti-Semitism continued in Europe. The Holocaust survivors who traveled first east to seek and not find family survivors and then, experiencing cold welcome including pogrom, fled back west to ports to flee from Europe by sailing in rickety ships into the teeth of the British blockade against Jews told us back then.
There are today a lot of disputed borders in the world, but the one that captures the EU’s attention, down to labels on wine bottles, is “the non-recognition by the Union of Israel’s sovereignty over the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967.” By the EU, “the West Bank is a territory whose people, namely the Palestinian people, enjoy the right to self-determination.” Multiple times in its labeling edict, the EU rubs in “the West Bank” as “the West Bank including East Jerusalem.” By the EU, the term “settlement” has “a demographic dimension beyond its geographical meaning, since it refers to a population of foreign origin.” So much, in Europe’s eyes, for Jewish homeland rights in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem.
The UN: “Zionism Is Racism” wasn’t a one-time eruption of maltreatment of Israel by the UN. Contemptuous maltreatment of Israel has been par for that council’s course. A recent nadir was, alas-America-inspired UNSC 2334, seeking to undo the Six Day War and gift historic Jerusalem – thrice Jewish state capital and renewed Jewish majority since the 1800’s – and Judea-Samaria to “the Palestinians” who’ve never ruled any of it. But the deepest damage to Arab-Israeli peace prospects has been the UN’s long obsession as Dr. Palestine with perpetuating and multiplying the half million Arabs who left tiny Israel – fewer in number than the Israel-absorbed indigenously Middle-eastern Jewish refugees from vast Arab and other Muslim lands – into Dr. Palestine’s Monster. What Palestinian Arab leader has the anatomy to tell these three-quarters-of-a-century tenants of Arab “host” states’ “refugee camps” there is no “Right of Return”?
America: Back in 2016, I viewed the approaching US election as “well, it’s the Republicans’ turn to lie to us about moving the embassy.” Trump moved it. He recognized Israel’s sovereignty in the Golan Heights. He came up with a peace plan recognizing Jewish homeland claims in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem. He was instrumental in achieving the Israel-UAE & Bahrain agreements, all this on the heels of the Obama administration’s farewell kick of UNSC 2334.
There are today real differences between the Republican and Democratic parties in their Arab-Israeli conflict solution approaches. Daniel Shapiro, US Ambassador to Israel from 2011 to 2017, wrote in the Times of Israel (5/18/20, Democrats’ Stand on Annexation Poses a Dilemma for Israel): “Support for a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps remains a consensus policy within the Democratic Party ….” Most Israelis, backed by American Jews like me who agree with them, see that west-of-the-Jordan “two-state solution” (never mind the Palestinian Arab-majority state in the 78% of Palestine east of the Jordan) as rendering Israel militarily indefensible and Jewishly meaningless.
American Jews: About twenty years ago, Jonathan Tobin told me that the biggest victims of western media anti-Israel bias are American Jews. I don’t think I agreed with him then. I agree with him now. Smoking-gun evidence of this resides in the open letter that the American Jewish Reform and Conservative movements, rabbis and all, along with several other organizations, wrote to President Trump in April last year.
The language used in that letter by these core pillar institutions of American Jewry is that of the loaded lexicon of poisoned pejoratives the mainstream media uses to diminish and delegitimize Israel – “annexation” in “the West Bank,” borders that hew precisely to “the 1967 borders” save for any mutually agreed “territorial adjustments.” Jews should say “Judea and Samaria,” Hebrew-origin names the UN itself used in 1947, not “West Bank,” which Jordan coined post-invasion in 1950 to disassociate these places from Jews. Israel’s application of Israeli law there would not be “annexation,” which connotes taking over another nation’s territory as your own. There were no “1967 borders,” only 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines, declared in their defining document not to be international borders, and referring to mutually agreed “territorial adjustments” thereto rubs in these long-gone ceasefire lines’ mischaracterization as “borders.”
Is that the nadir? Alas, it’s not. The ZOA posted on its website, zoa.org, this week:
“ZOA Criticizes ADL, Reform/Conservative Movements, JCRCs, HIAS, Etc. Signing Ad Supporting Israel & Jew-Hating Black Lives Matter Movement, Co-Signed With Israel-Haters”
Here’s the link, which might work: https://zoa.org/2020/09/10441209-zoa-criticizes-adl-reform-conservative-movements-jcrcs-hias-etc-signing-ad-supporting-israel-jew-hating-black-lives-matter-movement-co-signed-with-israel-haters/
Here’s one paragraph:
“The Zionist Organization of America strongly criticized the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Hadassah, Jewish Community Relations Councils (JCRCs), the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, B’nai B’rith’s Colorado branch, the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, HIAS (a group resettling overwhelmingly non-Jewish, largely Muslim refugees; less than 1% of HIAS’ clients are Jews), Ameinu, and others for signing a New York Times full page advertisement promoting the Jew-hating, Israel-hating, Marxist, anti-nuclear family, Farrakhan-loving, Soros-funded Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization. BLM has been condemned as anti-Semitic Israel-haters by Alan Dershowitz, Caroline Glick, Melanie Phillips, and many others. Author and Commentator Dennis Prager called BLM ‘evil.”
I wish I were making this up.
Two New Year’s Resolutions: [1] Pour yourself a stiff drink. [2] See if you buy the following: Ariel Sharon, outstanding military leader in what are considered discrete Israeli wars, said this: Israel has fought only one war, its War of Independence, and it is still being fought. I’d add this: That war, being waged in our time, is one of the monumental events of our three-millennia Jewish history. Ben-Gurion called it the struggle for fulfillment of the Dream of Generations for our homeland’s sovereign redemption. We Jews never physically abandoned our homeland, but for close to two millennia the majority of our people lived as homeland-less “others” in Christendom and Muslim lands. Including during our own time, millions died al kiddush hashem. Picture them in our place, safely residing today in freest-ever democratic America. Do you think they’d support a militarily secure and Jewishly meaningful Jewish homeland in the land of Israel that’s historically and legally ours?
As I said, L’Shanah Tova