WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A new JCPA analysis of defensible borders for Israel reaffirms the overriding importance of a Jordan Valley longest narrowest border. All of us must support this, even those who’d partition the Jewish national home once again in the interest of definitively ending the conflict.
The Jordan Valley and American Jews: What’s Required Even of Those Favoring “The Two-State Solution”
A new analysis by the distinguished Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, authored by retired Gen. Kuperwasser and Amb. Dore Gold, on Defensible Borders for Israel, reiterates Israel’s long-standing position that “wars can only be won by the movement of ground forces.” Consequently:
“As long as ground forces remain the decisive component in Israel’s national security strategy, the terrain, topography, and strategic depth have not lost their relevance. They have always been – and still remain – critical components that Israel needs for defensible borders.”
The mother of all terrain, topography and strategic depth western Palestine geographical features, dominating Israel’s narrow coastal plain with the heart of the country’s population and industry, is cited in this JCPA study as this:
“The Jordan Valley is not just the water bed where the Jordan River is located. It includes the steep slopes of the West Bank mountain ridge facing the Jordan River. Taking into account the fact that the Jordan River is adjacent to the lowest point on earth – roughly 1.300 feet below sea level – and the mountain ridge reaches a maximal height of 3,300 feet above sea level, the Jordan Valley really constitutes a strategic barrier reaching more than 4,500 feet in some places.”
One does not have to possess the military acumen of an Allon or Rabin to grasp the Jordan Valley’s defensible border significance, or to agree with Allon, as this JCPA analysis does, with JCPA emphasis added, that “in order to assure a strong defensive deployment and the strategic integrity of Israel,” it’s not enough, contrary to the opinion of some western experts, for Israel to retain security positions on the soil of former adversaries, but that these strategic places “be joined to Israel as an integral part of the state,” in any permanent status arrangement for a final stable peace. [Cf Rabin’s final 1995 Knesset speech: “We will not return to the 1967 lines …. The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.” Rabin envisioned a western Palestine Palestinian Arab entity “to be an entity which is less than a state.”]
However, Jewish sovereignty in the Jordan Valley is of course flatly contradicted by UNSC 2334, adopted 14-0-1 in the Obama administration’s final days, declaring every historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria inch over the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines, to which the UNSC will recognize no deviations not agreed to by Palestinian Arabs, to be “occupied Palestinian territory.” It’s also inconsistent with what former U.S. Amb. To Israel Shapiro called the “consensus policy” of America’s Democratic Party – “1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps” Israel borders.
Can you picture Palestinian Arabs agreeing that the Jordan Valley is part of Israel? Latrun? The hills dominating the Jerusalem corridor? The Old City (Temple Mount, Western Wall)? City of David?
What is incumbent upon all of us American Jews, however we may individually feel about “the two-state solution,” whether as defined by the UN, a Democratic Party consensus, or even more broadly, to do is to contest the denial of our Jewish people’s homeland rights beyond the 1949 ceasefire lines, which are no holier (indeed, less holy) than their successor 1967 ceasefire lines between the same warring sides. (Cf the old Philly Inquirer editorial cartoon depicting Moses upbraiding Bibi for building “settlements” over the 1949 CE “green line.”)
We ordinary grassroots American Jews aren’t experts in the legal (San Remo, Mandate, etc.) and historical (continuous post-biblical presence) details of our land of Israel homeland claim, but we can and must stop using terms that denigrators of our homeland claim put in our mouths.
One such infuriating term is Greater Israel, referencing everything over the 1949 lines – i.e., Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem. The original Palestine Mandate encompassed all of Palestine, on both sides of the Jordan River. Per an option in the Mandate, Britain could and immediately did lop off from its Jewish national home as Arab Transjordan (today’s Jordan) the 78% east of the River. And now the world would lop off as Arab “Palestine” another chunk of that remaining 22%, calling the Jewish claim to the entirety of that remaining 22% “Greater Israel”? Lesser Israel is what would be left of such a second partition of Palestine.
Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem are not Occupied Palestinian Territories. And it’s not enough for us to say they’re “disputed.” The world says they’re “Palestinian,” not “disputed,” and we have to say, with more basis for saying so than people that have never ruled any part of them, that they’re Ours.
There is no Palestinian refugee issue. The 1948 war (i.e., Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction) and its aftermath saw Israel absorb more indigenously Middle-eastern Jewish refugees from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel, Arabs whose
“refugee” descendants are still internationally supported today, including in Palestine itself, to keep the Arab-Israeli conflict over Palestine pot bubbling. It’s a two-sided Palestine conflict refugee issue, not a one-sided “Palestinian” one.
There are no 1967 borders, just 1949 war, succeeded by far less perilous to Israel, historic Jerusalem encompassing, 1967 war ceasefire lines. Those old, 19-year existing, half-a-century-ago obliterated 1949 ceasefire lines are not among the Holy Land’s holy places.
Historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria weren’t captured/seized by Israel in 1967. They were liberated by a homeland Jewish people with the strongest historical and international treaty claim to them. Palestinian Arabs have never ruled any part of them ever, foreign Arab dynasties only between 638 and 1099, and invading Jordan 1948-67. The media incessantly references 1967 to suppress three thousand years homeland Jewish history.
Utterly senseless is Israeli and Diaspora Jews ourselves calling Jewish communities in Judea-Samaria and eastern Jerusalem “settlements,” which the media gleefully contrasts, often in the same sentence, with nearby “Palestinian towns, villages, neighborhoods.”
Israel isn’t the Zionist entity, which our adversaries characterize it to suppress three millennia pre-Zionist Jewish homeland connection. Eastern – i.e., historic – Jerusalem, with its three-thousand year, twice prior Jewish state capital, Jewish presence and renewed Jewish majority from pre-Zionist 1800’s Ottoman empire rule, isn’t a Jewish history-less “East Jerusalem.” Judea-Samaria, which is what the UN itself called it in its 1947 western Palestine partition resolution, isn’t “the West Bank,” which Jordan coined after invading it 1948, and “the Palestinians” are Palestinian Arabs, not exclusively “The Palestinians.”
There are of course more terms, all slanted in the same direction, mocking and denigrating the historical and legal legitimacy of our Jewish homeland of Israel, all in the service of shrinking it, at least for openers, to a militarily indefensible, Jewishly meaningless ghetto-sliver of the historic land of Israel, sans historic Jerusalem, Latrun, the Jerusalem corridor hills, etc., and the Jordan Valley and Judea-Samaria ridge secure longest, narrowest border. If you must support “the two-state solution,” do it as a meaningful compromise of our legitimate rights in the interest of peace, not as a mere eviction of Jews from “Occupied Palestinian Territory.”