WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Well, here’s ZOA’s take on Obama’s new book, in a letter it just wrote to the publisher pointing out omissions and errors and seeking corrections. What should bother us grassroots American Jews most is the impressions of Israel Obama implants in Americans’ minds. I try to assess these below. We can’t dispel these in a letter, but we can make clear, including through the Israel-related language we use, that the land of Israel, historic Jerusalem and the Judea-Samaria hill-country heartland included, is the Jewish national home.
This Week: Answering Obama’s “A Promised Land’s” Jaundiced View of Our Promised Land
On February 23, ZOA addressed an 11 page letter (linked on www.zoa.org) to the CEOs of Penguin Random House, publisher of former President Obama’s new book, A Promised Land, specifically addressing 15 “factual inaccuracies, material omissions and outright falsehoods” in this work that “has already reached and influenced millions of readers and will impact many more.”
ZOA rightly called on the publisher to make corrections to these specific errors and omissions, in some instances down to the particular word choices the former President used, but what’s of particular importance to us grassroots American Jews is not the former President’s specific words, but, more broadly, the distorted impressions of our Jewish homeland of Israel implanted by Obama’s book in Americans’ minds.
So here are those 15 Obama misstatements which ZOA points out, with my assessments of the broader impressions of Israel Obama implants that we must dispel. Along the way, ask yourself whether maybe Obama really believing all this explains his references to Israel in his early in his presidency Cairo address in 2009, and UNSC 2334 at the end of 2016 on his way out the door.
#1: Balfour started the struggle: Obama dates the Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict to 1917, when he says the British, “then occupying Palestine, committed to create ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in a region overwhelmingly populated by Arabs.”
ZOA responded that the Jews were not newcomers to Palestine, but had maintained “connection to and presence in” the land for over three thousand years [see also, Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, Pavilion Press, 2005, 2011.] ZOA cited the Mandate’s recognition of “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and … the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”
The impression we must dispel is that Britain and the League of Nations “created” a Jewish connection to Palestine. On the contrary, the Mandate recognized the Jewish people’s twice previously sovereign three-millennia-long historical connection. Palestinian Arabs have never ruled Palestine ever, and foreign Arab dynasties only between 638 and 1099. Today’s Israel is the land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, every ruler in between having been a foreign empire invader, and mostly non-Arab at that.
#2: Next 20 years’ immigration surge and armed forces: Obama: “Over the next twenty or so years, Zionist leaders mobilized a surge of Jewish migration to Palestine and organized highly trained armed forces to defend their settlements.”
ZOA: The “First” and “Second Aliyah” preceded the Mandate. [And Zionism didn’t start something new. Katz wrote rightly in Battleground (p. 97) that “the living [post-biblical] movement to the land had never ceased.”] “By 1844, a majority of the population of Jerusalem were Jews.” Jews defended their communities because Arabs attacked them. Those “highly trained armed forces” during those early decades were lightly-armed watchmen. [During the next twenty years after that, the Haganah was kept largely underground and almost weaponless by the before-during-and-after-the-Holocaust Jewish-immigration-and-Jewish-arms-acquisition-blockading British.]
The impression we must dispel is of post-biblical Palestine’s population having been homogeneously Arab. Jews were not “exiled” by Rome, and a minority, bolstered by unending return, always remained. In 1947, there were 600,000 Jews and just a million or so Arabs.
#3: In 1948, “the two sides quickly fell into war.” Obama: In 1948, “Zionist leaders embraced” partition; Arabs “emerging from colonial rule” rejected it, and “the two sides quickly fell into war.” ZOA: Not exactly. Arabs invaded for Israel’s destruction, not “fell into war.”
The impression we must dispel is of Israel as a rootless European colonial implant into an “emerging from colonial rule” Arab Middle East. The biggest segment of Israel’s population today is Mizrahi – indigenously Middle-Eastern Jews who never left North Africa and the Mideast. And the 1948 war was an Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction.
#4: 1948 War left “stateless” Arabs “driven from their lands.”: Obama: The Jewish State was a “dream fulfilled” for Jews. “But for the roughly seven hundred thousand Arab Palestinians who found themselves stateless and driven from their lands,” it was a Nakba (Catastrophe). ZOA: The UN Mediator found only 472,000 Arab refugees from tiny Israel, well less than the over 800,000 indigenously Middle-Eastern Jews driven from vast Arab countries in the War’s wake. The Arab refugees weren’t “driven” out, but left “temporarily” at the behest of the Arab invaders.
The impression we must dispel is of a resident Arab population having been expelled in what the media calls “the war that followed Israel’s creation.” Americans are largely unaware that the Arab-Jewish conflict created more Israel-absorbed indigenously Middle-Eastern Jewish than Arab refugees, or that these “stateless” Palestinian Arabs are the large majority population of Eastern Palestine, Jordan, 78% of the original Palestine Mandate, which had been split off from it as an Arab entity, Transjordan, in 1922.
#5: Post-1948 Israel engaged in “a succession of conflicts with its Arab neighbors.” Obama: “For the next three decades, Israel would engage in a succession of conflicts with its Arab neighbors.” ZOA: “Israel defended itself against attack after attack by Arab countries and Arab terrorists whose avowed goal was Israel’s and its people’s destruction.”
The impression we must dispel is one of Arabs, until some very recently, acting like Israel’s “neighbors.” Palestinian Arab intifadahs, cross-border Arab infiltration raids, Hamas and Hezbollah attacks, and the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars were not “neighborliness.”
#6: Israel “seized” West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, Golan, Sinai in 1967 war: Obama: Israel “seized” these places during the War. ZOA: It was a defensive war for survival. Jordan had no claim to the so-called “West Bank,” there never was an “East Jerusalem,” and Israel’s rightful presence in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem is not “occupation.”
The impression we must dispel is dating of Jewish connection to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem to CE 1967, which “seizure,” and even less sneering “capture,” in 1967 is meant to do. Jews have lived in Jerusalem for 3,000 years, and prior to 1967 nobody called their presence there that of alien “settlers.” “Judea and Samaria,” Hebrew-origin names in continuous use for millennia, are not just “biblical” names for “the West Bank.” The UN itself used them in 1947.
#7: PLO arose after Six-Day War over “occupied territories”: Obama: The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) arose after the 1967 Six-Day War, as a “result” of “Palestinians living within the occupied territories….” ZOA: PLO arose in 1964, with its goal the destruction of pre-“occupied territories” Israel.
The impression we must dispel is of the Palestine conflict being over “the occupied territories.” In 1947, Bevin told Parliament that for the Jews “the essential point of principle” was to create in Palestine a Jewish state, and that for the Arabs to prevent that from happening. With the exception today of some Arabs, that’s still true today.
#8: Year 2000 Camp David Summit “collapsed in recrimination.”: Obama: Despite incredible territorial concessions [“97% of Judea and Samaria and all of Gaza … Arab neighborhoods in the eastern part of Jerusalem the capital of a new Palestinian Arab state”] offered by Israeli PM Barak, “Arafat demanded more concessions … and talks collapsed in recrimination.” ZOA: Arafat rejected Barak’s generous offer, made no counter offer, and soon unleashed the Second Intifada, murdering 1100 and wounding over 8000 Israelis, on buses, in restaurants, on the streets, at a Passover Seder. “The talks did not simply ‘collapse in recrimination.’”
The impression we must dispel is that the peace obstacle is that Israel has not offered significant territorial concessions. It has offered incredible concessions (incomprehensibly to some of us), virtually all that Palestinian Arabs demanded, and these have been summarily rejected, revealing that even reversing the Six Day War is not what the conflict’s about. The case we must make is that the Oslo approach, if ever peace might have grown from it, is over. that historically and under international treaty, San Remo and the Mandate, Israel has legitimate claim to Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria and will retain these intrinsic parts of the Jewish homeland.
#9: Sharon’s September 2000 Temple Mount visit provoked the Second Intifada: Obama: Sharon’s Temple Mount visit to “one of Islam’s holiest sites” was “deliberately provocative” and a “stunt” that “enraged Arabs near and far.” ZOA: Obama omitted that “Temple Mount is the [emphasis ZOA’s] holiest site in Judaism.” AP reported in 2001 that “Arafat began plotting the terrorism and violence in July 2000,” after rejecting the Camp David Summit peace offer. [The “stunt” was Arafat’s in latching onto Sharon going where Jews can legitimately go (and had been arranged in advance).]
The impression we must dispel is that Muslim adoption of places holiest to Jews a millennium or more before they became holy to Muslims supersedes their Jewish holiness. This recent years’ tendency is exemplified by the case of the Temple Mount itself, as shown by CAMERA in a 2016 analysis, “Mapping Changes in Terminology Used by BBC To Describe the Temple Mount.” Compare BBC 9/29/04: “… known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, and to Jews as Temple Mount,” versus BBC a decade later, 5/11/14: “Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque compound, known to Jews as Temple Mount.”
#10: Israel answered Hamas rocketing by “leveling neighborhoods in Gaza”: Obama: “Hamas rockets launched from Gaza into Israeli border towns [were] answered by U.S.-supplied Apache helicopters leveling neighborhoods in Gaza.” ZOA: Israel doesn’t “retaliate” – i.e., like-for-like answer Hamas rocketing of Israeli towns by “leveling neighborhoods.” It goes after the Hamas rocketeers. It drops leaflets, makes phone calls, “knocks” on the roofs with blank bombs, of civilians embedded in the Hamas rocket launching sites.
The impression we must dispel is that of tit-for-tat moral equivalcnce between terrorists targeting Israeli civilians and the IDF responding against the terrorists. The media’s frequent invocation of the term “retaliate” tries to purvey tit-for-tat.
#11 – 13: Mistreatment of Palestinian Arabs: Obama: Israel has blockaded Gaza, built a “wall more than 400 miles long” and armed soldier-manned checkpoints to control worker flow into Israel. ZOA: Gaza border restrictions are to prevent terrorism, but Israel ensures “hundreds of trucks filled with food, medical and other humanitarian supplies are delivered into Gaza each day.” The “wall” is 97% fence, a wall only where Arab snipers had been shooting at Israeli cars for years. The checkpoints also prevent terror and violence.
The impression we must dispel is of Palestinian Arabs as persecuted homeland-less peaceful people with no country where they’re the population majority. Eastern Palestine, Jordan, 78% of the Palestine Mandate, has a Palestinian Arab majority population.
#14: Abbas has recognized Jewish State and renounced violence: Obama: Abbas was chosen to succeed Arafat “in large part due to his unequivocal recognition of Israel and his long-standing renunciation of violence.” ZOA: Abbas rejects Israel as the Jewish state. Palestinian Arabs name streets and schools after terrorists and reward terrorists and their families “with lifetime pensions for murdering Jews.” [Palestinian Arabs have expressly rejected “the two-State solution” in its meaningful U.S.-Israeli sense of “two states for two peoples.”]
The impression we must dispel is of “The Palestinians” as violence-renouncing, “two-states-for-two-peoples”-seeking folks who only want to share Western Palestine with their Jewish State neighbor.
#15: “Occupation” of “the Palestinian territories”: Obama: “… just about every country in the world considered Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories to be a violation of international law….” ZOA: Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem aren’t “Palestinian territories.” Numerous legal authorities affirm Israeli presence’s legality. “In fact, Israel has the right to these areas under international law,” per San Remo, the Mandate and other documents. Jews have lived there from ancient times, and Palestinian Arabs have never been sovereign there ever. “Israel cannot be called an occupier of lands to which Israel has the lawful sovereign right.”
The impression we must dispel is that our historical and legal Jewish claim to our homeland of Israel, including Judea, Samaria and historic Jerusalem, is contestable. Even those who’d cede part of it in peace negotiations must make our case. And all of us must wash from our mouths terms that have been designed to undermine our very claim to our homeland. E.g.: “West Bank … East Jerusalem … 1967 borders … seized/captured by Israel in 1967 … settlers and settlements [alongside ‘Palestinian’ neighborhoods/towns/villages] … occupied territories /Palestinian territories/occupied Palestinian territories … [Palestinian Arabs as] The Palestinians.” Only then can we demand others stop using these Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejorative terms.