WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: An American Jewish big this week warned of the need to counter the narrative of Israel as “a white-colonial bastion.” Indeed, but we can’t stop with showing that Black and Brown people freely live there. We have to show Israel has been our uninterrupted homeland for three thousand years.
Countering the “White-Colonial Bastion” Narrative: “Israel’s Not White”, “Israel’s Long Been Our Homeland,” Both?
A Times of Israel article this week, US Antisemitism Far Worse Than Reported, Say Conference of Presidents Leaders, Monday, May 31, rightly quoted three top leaders of The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations on what the article called “a drastic spike in antisemitism across the US surrounding the recent conflict in Israel and Gaza.”
Of particular interest to me were remarks of William Daroff, Conference of Presidents CEO. He said,
“We have seen how Black Lives Matter and others have been turned through intersectionality into anti-Israel movements, which have strong anti-Semitic components….”
The article added:
“For Daroff, it is crucial the US Jewish organizations fight the narrative that Israel is a ‘white-colonial bastion.’
“He said Jews and supporters of Israel must put forth an alternative narrative that ‘there are brown and black people who are here [he was speaking from Israel], who are engaged, who have their own story of oppression and survival, as well as their own story in America….’”
Certainly, we must get across to Americans that Mizrahi, indigenously Middle-eastern, Jews are the biggest segment of Israel’s population, and that, as Israeli Steve Kramer tells me (reported herein a couple weeks back), “Israeli” is increasingly a blend of multiple Jewish people streams now physically and culturally fading in their separate identities there.
But that’s just the beginning, not the totality, of our Jewish homeland “narrative,” if you will, that we must get across to Americans. Jews have lived in our homeland of Israel, not just in the part of it lying west of natural-featureless 1949 military ceasefire lines between Israel and the invader Jordan snaking through it, without interruption for three thousand years.
Biblical era archeology is ever more vividly bringing to light ancient Israel’s historicity, and certainly it would help for Israel to make available to Westerners, perhaps through Christian and Jewish religious channels, well-documented popular accounts of discoveries.
But the bottom-line answer to today’s Israel being, as Black Lives Matter puts it, a “settler-colonial project” needing “dismantling,” is not just that non-persecuted Black and Brown Israelis live there, but that all during those eighteen exclusively foreign empire rule centuries between Judaea’s destruction in CE 135 and Israel’s independence in 1948 as the land’s next native state, homeland Jews Never Left. (Does this seem unlikely to you? I won’t recount Jews’ post-biblical homeland presence here, I’ve done it before in these emails; historian Parkes said it wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds,” but read, e.g., my I-think-readable for-general-readers book, Israel 3000 Years, Amazon, with its 600-some archeologist/historian-citing footnotes.)
But what, by your leave, I will try to do here is discuss a pair of terms – one which we use but shouldn’t, and a related one which we don’t use but should – that we grassroots American Jews misuse to our detriment.
“Palestine” Is Not a Dirty Word
One of these words – the one in which we don’t claim equity but should – is “Palestine.” A photo spread of an anti-Israel demonstration gracing the Philadelphia Inquirer’s website Philly.com last week stated:
“The protesters demanded an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”
What’s the “Palestine” that the Inquirer was referring to here? Presumably the area between the 1949-to-1967 Israel-invading Jordan military ceasefire line, obliterated by renewed 1967 fighting, again initiated by Jordan, between the same sides. “Palestine,” as defined in the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate embraces today’s Israel and Jordan. The Inq here is trying to excise Israel from “Palestine,” of which it’s the western part. Israel and Jordan are Palestine states. Today’s howling for creating “a Palestinian state,” as though none exists, seeks to confer an exclusively Arab equity in the place “Palestine.” Jews should not shy away from the name “Palestine,” which, btw, was coined by Rome, in memory of the long-gone Sea-people Philistines, to disassociate what had been Judaea, before that Yehud, before that Israel & Judah, from Jews.
But Calling Exclusively Arabs “THE Palestinians” Is
On the other hand, the term which we do use but shouldn’t is that of bestowing on Palestinian Arabs the mantle of “THE Palestinians,” as though, as intended by foes of the Jews, these Palestinian Arabs are the exclusive legitimate people of Palestine. Stop calling Palestinian Arabs “THE Palestinians.” Palestine’s Jews are “Palestinians” too.
Does this seem unlikely to you too? Here are two folks’ testimonies that it’s true.
The Associated Press, on 12/11/11, wrote that during the Mandate
“Muslims, Christians and Jews living there were all referred to as Palestinians.”
And here, of all folks, is the UN, expressing its hope, in its Palestine partition attempt in 1947
“to encourage and support the peaceful development of the mutual relations between the two Palestinian peoples throughout the Holy Land” [emphasis added]
Even if you’d agree to a “two-state solution along the 1967 [i.e., 1949] lines, with mutually agreed land swaps,” make what you’d be giving up – Judea-Samaria, historic Jerusalem – worth something. Don’t meekly surrender Jewish equity in the place name “Palestine,” and don’t gratuitously bestow on Palestinian Arabs (the majority population of 78% of the Palestine Mandate, Jordan) exclusive membership in “the Palestinians.”