WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: For the minority of grassroots American Jews of my anti-“Two-State Solution” persuasion, what now? The case we must make to fellow grassroots American Jews less concerned than us with the issue of the Jewish homeland’s sovereign borders is not just that the American Reform and Conservative movements’ et al “Two-States” position is wrong, but misleadingly presented.
And perhaps if we can just get less interested grassroots U.S. Jews to read one or two of those truly moving modern Israel saga books (I make a couple suggestions) that are out there, feelings in them for the centrality to our peoplehood of the reborn-in-our-time sovereign Jewish homeland of Israel will awaken. Worth a shot?
Picking Up Pieces
Repercussions of How We Voted This Year
What seems to me to have been a long long time ago, my wife’s grandfather, a Philly manufacturer, aided what were becoming increasingly distant cousins in pre-state Palestine. When we visited Israel, still a long time ago, their families received us warmly in Jerusalem and in Haifa. I remember clearly a conversation we had in their Jerusalem apartment after their hosting an enjoyable dinner.
“So when are you coming here?”
“We are here,” I replied.
They answered smiling, knowing I knew it, “We meant come here to stay.”
I countered, “Why do you think America supports Israel?”
“It’s the right thing to do.”
“Certainly, it’s the right thing to do. But that’s not the reason.”
Well, not the sole reason. It’s in America’s strategic interest to have a country like Israel in the Mideast which it can confidently call “friend.” There are also in America tens of millions of Evangelical Christians and a few million well-Electoral College-placed American Jews.
I read that by a slim majority, the state of Georgia’s Jews voted for Trump, and forty percent of those in Florida. But overall, depending on which news source you read, seventy to eighty percent of America’s Jewish voters did not. I will not rub in here all that Trump has done for the Jewish homeland of Israel, against strong European opposition, on the heels of the Obama-Biden administration’s 2334 kick on their post-election way out the door. But I will cite a couple opening shots fired by Dem machers already this week
*** Jewish Voice, Friday, 11/6/20, “Harris: Biden Administration Would Reverse Several Trump Policies on Palestinians”
*** Times of Israel, Thursday, 11/5/20. “Ilhan Omar Accuses Israel of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ After Demolition of Palestinian Hamlet”
and worry that the 2020 election’s Jewish vote, higher than normal for the GOP though it was, will reverberate with the GOP, in the face of all that Trump’s done, beyond the 2020 election: “[Something, something,] they won’t vote for us, anyway.”
So what do we do now, we minority of grassroots American Jews unenamored of “The Two-State Solution”? We start picking up pieces. I suggest here two places to start.
Reassessing Our Place in the Organized American Jewish Community
There’s something more deeply troubling here than that the organized American Jewish community’s institutions and majority of their constituents, along with the UN, EU and U.S. Democratic Party, believe in “the two state solution,” while a minority of American Jews, including me (along with most Israelis), don’t.
What’s most troubling, as I see it, is the misleading manner in which key American Jewish institutions state their two-state-solution allegiance. I do not regard this as innocent ignorance. Nor is harmless, given, e.g., what the Jerusalem Post reported this week, Saturday, 11/7/20, “UN [Europeans and all] Speaks of Temple Mount Solely as Muslim Site, Ignores Jewish Ties.”
This has been going on under our noses, at least our averted eyes, right here in America. E.g., on July 15, 2017, the Times of Israel and Philadelphia Inquirer both ran the same AP photo of Israeli police standing in front of a green metal door leading to what has been called “the Temple Mount” here in the West for longer than Judea-Samaria had been called “Judea-Samaria.” The TOI captioned this photo
“Israeli border police officers stand guard at the entrance to the Temple Mount compound in Jerusalem’s Old City.”
My hometown USA Philadelphia Inquirer captioned:
“Israeli border police officers stand guard at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem.”
(Well, at least on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, to the Inq buildings matter.)
A self-respecting, if not legal-standing, position statement for American Jewish institutions regarding Israel’s borders would be that Israel has substantial historical and international treaty-based claims to historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, but in a compromise peace agreement should relinquish part or all of these areas. But that’s not how the American Reform and Conservative movements state their Israel borders position.
They declare themselves, along with other big American Jewish organizations, (open letter to President Trump, 4/12/19) utterly opposed to “annexation by Israel of any territory in the West Bank.” Jordan coined the name “West Bank” for the portion of western Palestine it invaded and seized in 1948 to replace the millennia-used (including by the UN in 1947) Hebrew-origin names Judea and Samaria. Self-respecting Jews should say “Judea-Samaria.” And “annexation” – Encarta dictionary, accessed as word lookup in ‘Word’: “to take over territory and incorporate it into another political entity, e.g., a country or state” – is disgracefully worse. Even Jews willing to give away Judea-Samaria in a compromise peace settlement shouldn’t give it away for nothing before trying to sell it for something. Say “apply sovereignty,” not “annexation.”
But even with that, the American Jewish Reform and Conservative sects weren’t done. They called in that open letter to the President for “Two-States’” borders that “hew precisely” to “the 1967 borders” save for any mutually agreed “territorial adjustments.” The 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement that with a green pen had drawn those so-called in that letter “1967 [i.e., 1949] borders” expressly declared that line to be a military ceasefire line only, without prejudice to either side’s peace settlement claims and positions. Article II:
“… no provision of this Agreement shall in any way prejudice the rights, claims and positions of either party hereto in the ultimate peaceful settlement of the Palestine question, the provisions of this Agreement being dictated exclusively by military considerations.”
Which brings us American Jewish grassroots dissenters from the American Reform and Conservative movements’ officious Israeli-Palestinian Arab peace process position to what? Bearing in mind that these movements run not only synagogues but religious schools for impressionable age American Jewish kids, I think the time’s come to consider separation from them. Would that there were another short-of-Orthodox branch of American Judaism adhering to the centrality of the Jewish homeland of Israel to Jewish peoplehood, even to just Jewish peoplehood. Alevai.
Reaching Out to Fellow Grassroots American Jews
Pending the arrival of such a new movement before the Messiah comes, we should deal with the difference between our lifetime experience and that of younger generations of American Jews who weren’t alive during the heyday of the Zionist movement, the Holocaust, Briha and Aliyah Bet, Israel’s incredible struggle for reborn independence, ingathering of the indigenously Middle-eastern Mizrahi Jews now forming half or more of Israel’s population, or even the heroically fought wars for survival of 1967 and 1973. There is a way.
As some of you know by now, I’m a collector of Jewish history books. I’ve given hundreds away, but I still have many hundreds. I’ve suggested as “required reading” by Jews of our time Herzl’s Jewish State, Dr. Weizmann’s Trial and Error, Begin’s Revolt and something, anything, by Ben-Gurion. Well and good for us, but that’s not our missionaries’ arsenal. The prime requirement of a book for hooking converts to Jewish peoplehood and Israel’s centrality is that such a book must be exceedingly, excitingly, readable. I’ve read such books. Here’s a sample.
*** Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate, in which he fulfills his prefatory promise to be “in the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmut.”
*** Yael Dayan’s Israel Journal – June 1967. She was with Sharon’s Sinai front ugda.
*** I. F. Stone’s Underground to Palestine. He traveled with some survivors.
*** Arie Eliav’s Voyage of the Ulua and Rudy Patzert’s Running the Palestine Blockade, and on the Exodus, Gruber’s Destination Palestine and, for those who can take its recalls of Holocaust brutality, suffering and courage, Kaniuk’s Commander of the Exodus. And, tracing the long history of the Exodus from its days as the President Warfield, Holly’s Exodus 1947.
*** Thicker but engrossing: Collins and Lapierre’s O Jerusalem (though marred by its imbalanced account of Deir Yasin), Kurzman’s Genesis 1948, and Leon Uris’ Exodus, historical fiction, though grounded in historical happenings; maybe its magic still works.