WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Turkey’s president Erdogan told his parliament this week that “Jerusalem is our city.” Also this week, Algemeiner ran an article titled “Historical Proof of Jewish Continuity in Israel.” This historical fact – We Never Left – forms part of the answer to Erdogan, and while we’re at it, to the UN re UNSC 2334, and to the EU with its product labeling decree, both calling historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria “Palestinian territory.”
This Week: Two Internet Articles that Ought to Wake Up Us American Jews
Turkey’s Erdogan: “Jerusalem Is Our City”
This week, the heir of one of those old foreign empire invaders that ruled the land of Israel between ancient Judaea and Israel today issued an arrogant, Jewish people-delegitimizing ownership claim to the core of our homeland. It’s incumbent upon not just Israel, but American Jews, including those who’d part with part of our homeland in a presumed peace-producing “two-state solution,” to assert with some spirit that the land of Israel is the homeland of Jews.
That old-foreign-empire heir is Turkey’s president Erdogan. The old Turkish Ottoman empire had ruled vast territory, including the land of Israel, for four hundred years, 1517-1917, from the Ottomans’ defeat of the Mamluks, the preceding foreign empire ruler, to the Ottomans’ own defeat by the Allies in World War I.
Times of Israel reported Thursday (TOI, 10/1/20, “Jerusalem is Our City,” Turkey’s Erdogan Declares) that Erdogan told Turkey’s parliament Thursday:
“In this city that we had to leave in tears during the First World War, it is still possible to come across traces of the Ottoman resistance. So Jerusalem is our city, a city from us.”
If you want to talk about Jerusalem “traces,” Mr. Turkish President, ok, let’s talk about Jerusalem traces. Start with wall traces. The Ottomans’ sixteenth century CE wall surrounding the Old City is impressive, very impressive. I’ve walked on and around it. But the Old City’s wall traces include some of our walls, a bit older than Ottomans’ – the Western Wall and other Temple Mount walls and other city walls, even what may have been a King Solomon wall and wall remains of what may have been King David’s Jerusalem palace.
Jewish archeological traces include seals with biblical names on them, shards with Hebrew writing on them, a tunnel that a Judahite king dug to redirect water from Assyrian invaders, remains from the Babylonian and Roman destructions.
Population traces: Every time a foreign invader from the Romans on kicked us out of Jerusalem, we relentlessly returned, and nobody during the past three thousand years up until very recently called Jews in Jerusalem “settlers.” We became Jerusalem’s majority population again in the pre-Zionist 1800’s, while Ottomans were still mismanaging the region, driving Palestine’s population down to its lowest in all recorded time.
The Mamluks left traces in Jerusalem too, as did the Crusaders, foreign Muslim dynasties (quite impressive traces – the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa), and Byzantines and Romans before them. But today’s State of Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, with Jerusalem as the capital of both, as it had been the capital of their Jewish predecessor, the kingdom of David and Solomon and then Judah. All these pre-Ottoman non-Jewish rulers, like the Ottomans, were foreign invaders. Jerusalem – capital of three native states in the past 3,000 years, all of them Jewish, and with a renewed Jewish population majority since the 1800’s, is OUR city, Mr. Erdogan, not that of any of the foreign empire invaders.
We should not let this week’s Turk claim to Jerusalem pass without across-the-board Jewish response to it. But a graver delegitimization of our Jewish claim to Jerusalem, and Judea-Samaria, is that of the UN and EU. They don’t say that the Jewish people should compromise our claim to historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria in a “two-state solution.” The UN and EU say we have no claim to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, and not even American Jewish supporters of “the two-state solution” should accept this.
UNSC 2334 says
“the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity ….” [UNSC 2334, on the Obama administration’s way out the door]
The European Union product labeling decree (ECLI:EU:C:2019:954) says that “the West Bank including East Jerusalem” is “a territory whose people, namely the Palestinian people, enjoy the right to self-determination” and declares “the non-recognition by the Union of Israel’s sovereignty over the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967.” It says that the term “settlement” has “a demographic dimension beyond its geographical meaning since it refers to a population of foreign origin.”
Let’s take the occasion of the Turkish president’s assertion that “Jerusalem is our city” to answer emphatically not only him but all who delegitimize our homeland claim to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem. Being willing to part with part of what’s ours, which many American Jews are, in a Palestine “two-state solution,” which by me ignores that Jordan is already a Palestinian Arab-majority state in 78% of Palestine, is one thing. Accepting that these parts, Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, are not ours to begin with, which silence in the face of this Turk assertion and UNSC 2334 and the EU labeling decree silently evinces, is even more self-delegitimizing.
Algemeiner article: “Historical Proof of Jewish Continuity in Israel”
In last week’s #1027, I discussed the significance of half of Israel’s population being Mizrahi, descended from the stream of Diaspora Jewry that had dwelt in the Middle East for centuries, even millennia. I said that it dispels the myth that Israel is a “European colonial implant” in the Mideast, that I agree with the internet article I cited last week that Arabs’ having a fuller appreciation of this composition of the Israelis will foster fuller acceptance by Arabs of Israel, and that, beyond that, Israel presenting a more Mizrahi face to the West, including to American Jews, will foster greater appreciation of Israel’s Mideast indigenousness by the West.
But Israel has even deeper unbroken indigenous Middle-eastern roots. Biblical Israel was as indigenously Middle-eastern as indigenousness gets. Few seriously deny that. The delegitimizers’ claim is that “the Romans exiled the Jews, and they were gone from the time of Hadrian to that of Herzl, eighteen hundred years.”
But that isn’t what historically happened. Historian James Parkes asserted in Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine that the Romans did not exile the land’s Jews, that they tenaciously clung to the land, despite every discouragement, all through the post-biblical foreign rule centuries, writing our time’s Zionists’ “real title deeds.” Samuel Katz cited Parkes approvingly in his classic work Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, and Prime Minister Begin, in his Foreword to the second edition of Battleground, wrote that the book’s most important chapter is that on the continuous presence of the Jewish people in Palestine. I traced our continuous presence from earliest through post-biblical times in my own book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine.
But now you don’t have to take just Parkes’ and Katz’s and Begin’s (and archeologist Bahat’s and others’) and my word for it Algemeiner ran an article this week, 9/30/20, Sivak and Finkelberg, Historical Proof of Jewish Continuity in Israel. It too makes our continuous presence case, citing post-biblical evidence. I commend this article to you, both as filling in an inadequately known piece of Jewish history and as a piece of the response to those who claim that the Jewish connection to the land of Israel stops abruptly at the ceasefire lines of 1949.
The Yishuv
A final word on that under-appreciated significance of the Yishuv, the homeland’s Jews, during those long dark foreign rule centuries between Hadrian and Herzl, between the Romans’ final destruction of ancient Judaea in CE 135 and the beginnings of the restoration in our own time of today’s State of Israel as the land of Israel’s next native state.
After writing at my book’s end of the final pre-Zionist returning home Diaspora Jews, I sum up:
“And so too has it been in every age the presence, beacon, magnet of the Yishuv, at times diminished to a pummeled minor minority, that has made the millennia-long return of countless generations of Jews possible, even thinkable, and formed the continuous generational link between ancient Israelites and Israelis today.”
We Never Left.