WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A folded paper fell out of my Haggadah First Seder night. And the State Dept. commemorated Passover week with a Report resurrecting “Occupied” for Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem. Come see what I make of these two Passover papers.
This Week: Two Passover Papers
#1: A Folded Paper Fell Out of My Haggadah
Over the years, when we’d visit Christian friends’ homes around Christmas time, they’d particularly point out to us tree ornaments that had been in their family for generations. I have no tree ornaments, but I do have, in the way of religion-orientated “heirlooms,” a Hanukkah menorah that had been my parents’ and my father’s “own” copy of the Haggadah – nothing different about it, the same edition as the others we laid around the dinner table Seder nights, but it had in the margins the penciled notes my father, as Seder leader, had made in it over the years. So that particular copy has been “mine” now, with my own notes added, since I inherited it, along with that menorah and the rest of our Haggadahs, from them.
So that explains why it was from that particular copy of our Seder books from which a folded piece of paper fell when we reached the “Dayenu” pages – “Had He brought us out of Egypt, and not divided the sea for us, Dayenu!” ,,, and so on – last Saturday night. And so it was while our unled guests were reciting “Had He divided the sea and not permitted us to cross on dry land … had He given us the Torah, and not led us into the Land of Israel ….” that I unfolded that paper and saw that it was an email my friend Howard of the ZOA had sent me and others last year with a list of actions that had been taken during his term in office by the then-American President bucking most of the world in recognizing our Jewish people’s millennia-long homeland connection to that Land of Israel – recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the Embassy, acknowledging our homeland claims in Judea-Samaria, etc. We recited them for the second time last Saturday night.
These weekly emails began as and still claim to be, at least now and again, a “media watch.” Perhaps you remember how almost all of our mainstream American media covered the opening of the American Embassy to Israel in Jerusalem during President Trump’s term – a split screen, half of which was a demonstration staged [the right word] by Hamas. A welcome wholesome non-split-screen exception was an interview Fox News’ Harris Faulkner conducted with Bibi. She made me feel she understood what that American Embassy opening in Jerusalem meant to us. If you saw that Fox News’ versus other media coverage, I’d value your take on it.
#2 – “Occupied” is Back in State Dept. Report Issued This Week
Maybe you remember the charming Passover-related editorial cartoon my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer ran April 1, 2015. It pictured the divided Red Sea with Israelites on the Egyptian side and a building under construction with an Israeli flag waving from the roof on the other. The caption has Moses shouting across: “Bibi! Enough with the settlements already!” A slight anachronism there. Confining the Land of Israel to inside the 1949 CE military ceasefire lines (no holier than the 1967 ceasefire lines, just 19 years later) didn’t occur until more than three thousand years after Moses’ time.
But that view that Jews are “occupiers” of Judea=Samaria and historic Jerusalem is that of the U.S. State Department in its annual “Human Rights” report issued this Passover week.
The ZOA, in what it called a “major analysis” of that State Dept. report (4/2/21) that found manifold faults with it, put it this way:
“It is deeply troubling that the annual U.S. State Department Human Rights Report for 2020, published this week, is strongly biased against the Jewish State of Israel, relies on falsehoods from anti-Israel and terror-connected NGO’s and others, and resumed using the inaccurate term ‘occupied’ to refer to the ‘West Bank.’ Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and eastern Jerusalem. The Trump administration had correctly and appropriately dropped the inaccurate term ‘occupied.’ (See U.S. State Department Human-Rights Report Returns to Using ‘Occupied’ Territories, JNS, Mar. 31, 2021.) Israel is not an ‘occupier’ – because Israel has the sovereign rights to these areas under binding international law….” [emphasis added]
Another term the State Department Report misuses is “nakba.” It says
“‘Nakba,’ or ‘catastrophe’ [is] the term used by Palestinians to refer to the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.”
(If this sounds familiar to you, recall this statement: “It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding.” – U.S. President Obama to the Whole World from Cairo, 6/4/09.)
The ZOA found multiple faults with this Report statement also. The “catastrophe,” from “Palestinians” point of view, is that Israel survived the Arab attempt, in which they themselves fully participated, to destroy it. And these Palestinian Arabs weren’t “displaced,” but mostly left “temporarily” at the Arab invaders’ instance. And referencing the 1948 war as “Israel’s War of Independence” in this context is misleading. It was an Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction that seized “land lawfully designated for the Jewish state (including Judea and Samaria and the eastern [including historic] portion of Jerusalem.” And add to the ZOA’s points that in that 1948 war and its wake more indigenously Middle-eastern Jews (whom Israel absorbed, and are today the biggest segment of Israel’s population) were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel.
And this ought to scare you. The State Department Report contains this disclaimer:
“Language in this report is not meant to convey a position on any final status issues to be negotiated between the parties to the conflict…..”
But appreciating that professional diplomats are the world’s past masters at language nuance, reflect on the words that immediately followed:
“… including the specific boundaries of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem ….”
This does not leave open “to be negotiated between the parties to the conflict” whether Jerusalem is to be redivided, but just where in to-be-redivided Jerusalem “the specific boundaries of Israeli sovereignty” will be. Given, as a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro has put it (Times of Israel, 5/18/20, Democrats’ Stand on Annexation Poses a Dilemma for Israel) that
“Support for a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps remains a consensus policy within the Democratic Party ….”
such “mutually agreed” deviations from “the 1967 [meaning 1949] lines” will likely be infinitesimal, and certainly not embrace the Old City and City of David holy places, all of which are on the “Palestinian” side of the Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines of 1949 (never mind the Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines of 1967). And never mind “the Palestinians’” penchant for bulldozing Jewish homeland holy places.
And as for prospects for such “mutually agreeing” on land swaps, here’s how a Jewish Exponent article, “What Would Peace Look Like? Palestinians Haven’t a Clue,” Andrea Cantor, 5/1/13, years ago summed up those prospects:
“It turns out that while the Palestinians agreed to territorial exchanges in principle, they refused to concede any specific territory that Israel wanted. They objected to Israel keeping the settlement blocs – one of Israel’s main reasons for wanting territorial exchanges. They refused to let Israel keep Latrun, which dominates the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway – a crucial issue for Israel, since gunfire from Latrun can and, pre-1967, often did shut down the entire highway. And they insisted that the ‘safe passage’ connecting the Gaza Strip to the West Bank be under Palestinian sovereignty, thereby effectively severing Israel in two (Israel proposed Israeli sovereignty but Palestinian control).”
What’s a Grassroots American Jew To Do?
Object determinedly (as Bennett on-air did to CNN’s Amanpour) to “occupation,” and, while you’re at it, to “West Bank … East [meaning historic] Jerusalem … Palestinian Territories … 1967 [meaning 1949] lines [and even worse ‘borders’] … Palestinian Arabs as exclusively ‘The’ Palestinians … etc.” You can still, unlike me, support “the Two-State Solution” while putting Jewish homeland negotiating value on Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem. But I think that if you read a good book or two [e.g., The Lion’s Gate] about the 1948 and 1967 wars – the desperate battles for Latrun, the Jerusalem corridor hills, Ammunition Hill, the neighborhoods adjacent the Old City walls, elsewhere in Judea-Samaria – you’ll pause before championing undoing the Six Day War and relinquishing Israeli control of these desperately fought-over existentially critical places.