WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: This week, a rabbi in Israel emailed me and others an impressively written document by a well-endowed Arab institution that photographically portrays “the Palestinians” as oppressed native victims of an “occupying” Israel. He asked how we’d respond to it. I gave it a shot. But Israel could give it a real shot.
This Week: How I’d Respond to a Document Portraying “Native Palestinians” as Victims of Israeli “Occupation,” and How Israel Could Really Respond to It
A rabbi in Israel with whom I correspond regularly sent around this week an impressive Arab Image Foundation (“AIF”) document (https://stories.arabimagefoundation.org/issue-202105), asking me and others how we’d respond to it.
AIF, donors to which include well-known Western foundations, possesses 35 historical photographic image collections of Palestinian Arabs, which it uses, as in this document, to make the case that “Palestine exists in the minds, hearts, photos and testimonies of millions across the globe. It exists not only as a territory with historical links to a wider geographic region but also physically as a society, a community of people seeking justice since 1948.”
AIF uses this particular document, a current issue of a continuing publication, “to attract your attention to” certain of these photo collections, including that of “Photo Act,” which it calls “a movement created by a group of image-makers who believe in photography as a tool to influence and fight for the rights of the Palestinian people, and every people who is under oppression and occupation.”
This document’s English version is well-written in an intellectual tone, drawing even on scientific analogies, including even the famous thought experiment of Schrodinger’s cat. Do not sell AIF’s energies and efforts short.
But, truth to tell, I did not get very far into thoroughly perusing this document. Paragraph 2 contained a jarringly different tone attack on us sufficient to provoke me to dash off my email reply to the rabbi as to how I’d respond to it.
– begin email reply to rabbi –
“Hi, Barnea,
“I address this question in the attachment:
“’A 14-year-old-girl recently asked me why Palestine was not on the map they were shown in school or anywhere on the internet. She felt it unfair that her Palestinian friends could not refer to their geographic home without qualifying that it is under Israeli occupation.’
“Palestine is not under ‘Israeli occupation.’ As defined by the post-Ottoman Empire League of Nations Palestine Mandate, it consists of today’s Israel and Jordan, 22% and 78%, respectively, divided by the Jordan River. So Arab Palestine IS on the map and the internet – it’s called ‘Jordan,’ nee Transjordan, with a Palestinian Arab majority population. Palestinian Arabs NEVER ruled western Palestine. And foreign Arabs ruled it, most of the time, between 638 and 1099. Jews have ruled it three times – Judah & Israel, Judaea and Israel – each with a Jewish majority capital in Jerusalem. But the Arabs do rule 99% of the Mideast and North Africa.
“Although the Jews remained, as a persecuted minority, in the land of Israel, western Palestine, after the Roman destruction, they also lived for eighteen hundred years as persecuted, REALLY persecuted, minorities in Muslim and Christian lands. Enough of that.
“The land of Israel, including Judea-Samaria (what even the UN called it in 1947) and historic Jerusalem, is the three-millennia Jewish homeland, historically and legally ours. Nobody has a stronger claim to its homeland, and nobody needs its homeland more. And nobody is less likely to meekly walk out of the meaningful and defensible heart of it.
“Jerry”
– end email reply to rabbi –
The real reply to the AIFs of this world, which comprise the substantial part of it that sees our Jewish homeland as a “settler-colonial project” needing “dismantling,” has to come from our homeland itself. In the Q&A following a talk some years ago by the then-Philly Consul General of Israel to the local ZOA, I pleaded with him for Israel to build on the ample grounds of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, through which visiting VIPs are duly conducted on their arrival, a museum vividly documenting our Jewish people’s uninterrupted three-millennia homeland presence, not least during what archeologist Dan Bahat rightly calls “the forgotten generations” living in the homeland between Hadrian and Herzl. “What for?” he answered me. “It’s all around us.”
But like Bahat, British historian Parkes (Whose Land, p.266) had it right:
“It was, perhaps, inevitable that Zionists should look back to the heroic period of the Maccabees and Bar Cochba, but 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.” [quoted in Verlin, Israel 3000 Years, The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, p. iii]