WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Here are two people’s conflicting views on “the two-state solution” – President Biden’s and mine. You who agree with the President and I can agree at least on this: the position of American Jewry on “two-states” is important.
I state the foundations of my view on it here. If you agree with the President, I ask you to try to see the grave dangers to our homeland and people that not just I but most Israelis see in it. If you’re opposed to “two-states,” I suggest that among other steps you try to get Jewish “two-states” believers to see and reflect on these dangers we see.
“… a two-state solution is the only path to long-term security for Israel, while sustaining its identity as a Jewish and democratic state.” But is it?
In answer to this question posed by the Council on Foreign Relations on July 30, 2019,
“Do you support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, if so, how would you go about trying to achieve it?”
then U.S. presidential candidate Joseph Biden began:
“I believe a two-state solution is the only path to long-term security for Israel, while sustaining its identity as a Jewish and democratic state. It is also the only way to ensure Palestinian dignity in their legitimate interest in national self-determination….”
A substantial majority of American Jews (including not a few subscribers hereto) and our lay and religious organizations agree with now President Biden’s “two-state solution” position. All of you know that I don’t. I lay out below my contrary view, prefaced with my belief that officially delineating our Jewish homeland’s permanent international borders, irreversibly replacing the until-now until-next-round military ceasefire lines is super-critical to our people’s as well as homeland’s future.
Foundation for my position #1: We NEED a secure Jewish homeland. A Jewish people, not just a Jewish “religion,” exists, has existed for longer than 3,000 years, and has been subjected during the past two of those three millennia, including during my lifetime, to persecution as a stateless minority in other peoples’ lands that has been unique in its vehemence and places and times of occurrence. No people on earth has greater need of a homeland.
This need did not end, any more than it began, with the Holocaust. The UN, the EU, the media, religious fanatics, political extremists on both the left and the right, even here in America, are obsessed with us, now. For all the desecration of Christian religious sites by fanatical Muslims, the European representation in the UN voted unanimously for change of sovereignty over their Christian Jerusalem holy sites from Jewish, for all Israel’s protections, to Muslim.
Foundation #2: We HAVE a never-abandoned historical homeland. For all that “The Palestinians” claim to be “Canaanites,” it was Jews, not Arabs, who defended their kingdoms of Israel and Judah against mighty Assyrian and Babylonian empires, who wrested back Jewish homeland independence from the Seleucid successors of Alexander the Great, and who took on in four wars (63 and 37 BCE, 66-70 and 132-35 CE), the last two of them major and brutal, mighty Rome.
The Romans did not “exile” the Jews. We remained in the land, initially still the majority and then as a tenaciously-remaining minority, all through the long dark centuries of continuous invading foreign empire rule – by Romans-Byzantines, briefly Persians, Omayyad-Abbasid-Fatimid Muslim dynasties, Ayyubids, Mamluks and Turks – until today’s Israel became the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea. Historian Parkes put it this way, that while Zionists like to look back to the Maccabees and Bar-Kochkba,
“their real title deeds were written by the less dramatic but equally heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in the Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.” [Whose Land, p. 266, emphasis added, a little]
I wrote a book researching and documenting that Jewish presence: Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine (Pavilion Press, 2005, 2011). I’m not an historian, but I was Ivy League Law Review-trained in research and documentation, and I commend to you my 600+ footnotes citing historians, along with text I tried to make moving.
Foundation #3: Israel’s role is not to be “Democratic & Jewish,” but Secure & Jewish, not existentially perilously split with Palestinian Arabs who already have a Palestine homeland. The land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, is one geographical unit, with a long natural defensible border – the Jordan River, Jordan Valley, and Judea-Samaria ridge protecting a narrow central coastal plain. The 1949 man-drawn Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines that snake through it, bifurcating Jerusalem, is where the invading and defending armies then stood. It’s not at all based on defensible natural features. Read about the desperate 1948 and 1967 battles – over Jerusalem and its access corridor and overlooking hills, over Latrun, Ammunition Hill, Old City Wall-adjacent neighborhoods, many others. Restoring the old 1949 [intentionally mislabeled “1967”] lines will enticingly invite future invasion.
Palestinian Arabs aren’t the only people entitled to “dignity in their legitimate interest in national self-determination,” The Jewish people has such an interest – one far from fulfilled by a two-times international renege on a Palestine Mandate Jewish national home, first embracing Palestine on both sides of the Jordan, then just the 22% of Palestine west of the Jordan, and now dividing that 22%, depriving a so-slivered Jewish state of its defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland (newly renamed “the West Bank”) and historic (newly renamed “East”) Jerusalem, site of its three-times in history capital and holiest of holy places.
Nor does Israel keeping Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem (not one inch of which has ever been ruled by Palestinian Arabs ever, and by foreign Arabs only part of the time between 638 and 1099, and 1948 to ‘67) deprive Palestinian Arabs of dignity in legitimate interest in national self-determination, even in Palestine. Jordan is a fact, not an “option.” It is 78% of the original Palestine Mandate – fact. It has a majority population of Palestinian Arabs, including those who left western Palestine in that 1948 Arab invasion to destroy Israel in which Palestinian Arabs actively fully participated – fact. It’s in that Arab 78% from Palestine’s first, 1920’s, division, not in a 2021 second division of the 22% that the first division left for the Jews, that Palestinian Arabs’ self-determination interest fairly resides.
But two objections are raised: [1] Palestinian Arabs aren’t the rulers of Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan. So when was the last time you heard western politicians clamoring for Jordan to be made, at no cost of a single inch of Jordanian land, “Democratic & Arab”? Jordan’s king can more simply and fairly be made a constitutional monarch (cf England’s queen) than the land of Israel be artificially whacked up into hostile rump states respectively for Arabs and Jews.
[2] And what about “Palestinians” living today in “the West Bank” –i.e., Judea and Samaria? They can continue to live there as non-citizen residents or, if they want homeland citizenship rights, relocate to that 78% of Palestine that’s Arab Jordan. Is this asking too much of them? These Arabs’ western Palestine roots are not as millennia deep as the Middle East roots of Mizrahi Jews displaced, not exactly voluntarily, from Arab lands in the wake of the 1948 war who today constitute the biggest segment of Israel’s population.
Bottom Line
So that is why I view the western Palestine “two-state solution” that would make Israel “Democratic & Jewish” at the cost of forfeiting Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, with all of its holy places, and becoming a weak ghetto-sized remnant of San Remo’s and Mandate’s Jewish national home in the land of three-millennia homeland Jewish history to be the cause of folks who don’t like us very much – from the UN and EU on down, who champion it vigorously – and not the cause of Jewish homeland-respecting Israeli and Diaspora Jews.
We have to stop saying Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem are not “occupied” but “disputed” between Arabs and Jews. The world – the UN, EU on down – doesn’t call these intrinsic CORE parts of the Jewish homeland “disputed.” It calls them “Occupied Palestinian Territory.” We have to start calling them ours.
What Grassroots American Jews Can Do
At the foot of last week’s review of the State Department’s new Report referencing “occupation” and “nakba” and redividing Jerusalem, etc., I suggested we grassroots-niks use and demand use of proper terms, just as I’ve done now just above. Among this week’s emails was suggestions by a long-time good friend, a professional executive in the Jewish community’s Good Guys, and occasional contributor hereto as Deep Quote:
“Call the White House at 202-456-1414. Call local lawmakers to urge them to object to the many attacks/deficiencies in the [State Department] report. Pro-actively send letters to the editor, to local and national media to counter the lies. Print out the ZOA analysis and hand copies to friends and family, or email it.”
I’d expand just a bit on DQ’s last suggestion, making our case to our fellow grassroots American Jews. There is such pressure and more coming from so many directions pushing “the two-state solution” and so few voices, Israelis themselves excepted, against it, that the view of American Jewry on this is critical. There are incipient movements afoot challenging American Jewish institutional stands pushing “two-states,” but I think each of us who sees grave danger therefrom for our homeland and people should try, one-on-one when we can, to express our concerns to our fellow grassroots members, and try to get them to see the dangers we and Israelis themselves see in “two-states.”