WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: “Settler-colonial project … apartheid … oppressor and occupier of the Palestinian people,” etc. – where to begin our response? I think, first, by building our base. A new Pew survey says only 58% of American Jews feel “very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel,” just over half. How to increase that percent? I think through awakening more U.S. Jews to our most gripping, most meaningful of all peoples’ quests back to roots, to our continuous three-millennia hardly new “settler-colonial” homeland presence, and to that presence’s dual role as beacon-magnet for persecuted Diaspora Jews’ homeland return and as our Israelite-to-Israeli uninterrupted generational link.
Confronting This: “Among U.S. Jews overall, 58% say they are very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel”
What with some anti-Israel people in America loudly calling Israel a “settler-colonial project” needing “dismantling,” others calling it “apartheid,” or an “occupier and oppressor of the Palestinian people,” etc., etc., where to start answering back? I think by building our base.
A May 2021-released Pew survey, “U.S. Jews Have Widely Differing Views on Israel,” found: “Among U.S. Jews overall, [only] 58% say they are very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel,” based on surveys between November 2019 and June 2020. We need to bolster our ranks.
A clue to how to make our Jewish homeland case to more American Jews resides, I think, in the religious affiliation breakdown of Pew’s findings. 82% of Orthodox, 78% of Conservative, and 58% of Reform, but only a minority of unaffiliated Jews feel “very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel.” As to whether “God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people,” 87% of Orthodox agree, 46% of Conservatives, c. 25% of Reform, and 20% of those unaffiliated. So the approach to take, I think, is historical-legal, as opposed to religious.
The legal aspect is grounded in San Remo and the Palestine Mandate. The Mandate, with its Jewish national home and close settlement of Jews on the land, originally embraced what are today Israel and Jordan, but allowed Britain to excise the 78% of Palestine east of the Jordan River from the Mandate’s provisions, which Britain promptly did, creating today’s Jordan and leaving the 22% west of the River, Judea-Samaria and Jerusalem included, for the Jewish national home. That’s still in effect, not nullified by the General Assembly’s 1947 unimplemented western Palestine partition resolution, which the Arabs universally rejected with a multi-nation invasion that Israel threw back.
But it’s the historical side of our Jewish homeland case that most deeply appeals to me, and I think can be persuasively made to unaffiliated and non-Orthodox grassroots American Jews (and to non-Jews who’ll listen), who are unmoved by Promised Land title claims.
I would not hire the authors of high school history class tomes to present our historical case. They wrote the most boring books ever written. Our three millennia homeland Jewish history is the most gripping, most meaningful “roots” saga ever lived anywhere by any people. We have to and can present it in a way that makes presently indifferent Diaspora Jews come to feel they’re involved in it. Here’s my invitation on page 1 of the book that I wrote, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine: “Come along with me on this deepest of quests for peoplehood roots.”
“Conquest” or “Indigenous Origin”?
Part of what makes Jewish homeland history so intrinsically fascinating is that while it unassailably happened, just how it happened provides much grist for argument, starting from its very beginnings. Sentence 1 of chapter 1 of my book: “A book claiming for Jews a continuous three-millennia homeland presence in Israel must take up at the outset how the Israelites, as Jews were originally known, arrived or arose in that land. Arrived or arose?”
For all the archeological activity invested in unearthing it, “the origins of Israel,” as one expert pithily put it, “remain obscure,” or perhaps better said, “debatable.” Archeologists generally agree that they’ve found Israelite presence in the Judean and Samarian hills as far back as c. 1200 BCE, but sharply disagree whether the Israelites “arrived” there by Conquest or “arose” indigenously out of the existing Canaanite population (making Israelites’ “Palestinian” blood that much the bluer). I quote from both camps in chapter 1 of my book, and sum up, “neither side is wholly convincing,” but conclude chapter 1: “Whether by Exodus-Conquest or indigenous origin, the Israelites became established in the land by the twelfth century BCE, commencing a tenacious homeland attachment of a people to a place which the Jews have maintained with fiercely burning intensity for longer than three thousand years.” And in making the case that this is our homeland, millennia-long continuous presence matters.
“King David was as real as King Arthur”?
Through much of the twentieth century, biblical archeology uncovered much evidence of Israelite presence, alas just not in tenth century BCE Jerusalem, the time and place of King David. This led eventually to some “minimalists’” sneering dismissal, “King David was as real as King Arthur.” But then, in the summer of 1993 at Tel Dan in northern Israel archeologists uncovered an eighth century BCE enemy king’s inscription boasting of victories over the northern kingdom of Israel and over “the House of David.” Israeli archeologist Finkelstein, who takes a less-than-full-king view of David, assesses: “This is dramatic evidence of the fame of the Davidic dynasty less than a hundred years after the reign of David’s son Solomon.”
Much further evidence, including of what may be David’s fabled Jerusalem palace, has since come out of a substantial tenth century BCE Jerusalem-centered Israelite kingdom, suggesting David himself may have been a true king and not just a kingdom-founding dusty hilltop tribal chieftain. The debate continues into David’s son’s generation. Was the “United Kingdom of Judah and Israel” a big entity, as the Bible describes, or, e.g., were the six-chambered gates of the northern cities of Megiddo, Gezer and Hazor not Solomonic but later Kingdom of Israel?
How “Israelite” was the Northern Kingdom of Israel?
Among the authorities’ statements with which I had the chutzpah to argue in my book is Finkelstein’s assertion that the northern kingdom of Israel, more powerful than southern Judah, was not particularly “Israelite” in ethnic, cultural or religious senses. I quote five counter-statements in Finkelstein’s own book, The Bible Unearthed, but, as with David’s own stature, it’s grist for debate.
Was the Maccabees’ War just a Civil War between Jews?
Shortly after the Babylonians’ destruction of the First Temple, the Babylonian-conquering Persians allowed Jews and other exiled peoples to return to their homes, and the Second Temple was built in what became the Persian Jewish province “Yehud, which later became Judaea under Alexander’s Ptolemid and then Seleucid successors. Amid Seleucid attempts to eradicate Judaism, Maccabeen-led Jews revolted in a decades-long struggle eventually resulting in independence as the Hasmonean Jewish kingdom Judaea. Some commentators nevertheless call this struggle a “civil war” among Jews. Indeed, there were Hellenistic Jews who supported the Seleucids, just as there were American colonists who supported the British, but that did not make the American Revolution a civil war. It’s restored Jewish homeland independence, however short-lived, not a civil war, that Diaspora and Israeli Jews celebrate still today as Hanukkah.
Did the Romans Exile the Jews?
The Jews’ Great and Bar Kochba Revolts were major wars, not minor local rebellions, not just to the Jews but to the mighty empire of Rome. E.g., as Dio Cassius recorded, Hadrian did not email (ok, anachronism) the Senate that “I and the army are well.” But the widespread belief that on defeating Bar Kochba the Romans exiled Judaea’s surviving Jews, who were gone from the land for eighteen hundred years, is simply not true. Roman-Byzantine era synagogues all over the land, sages’ writing of the Mishnah and then Palestinian (Jerusalem) Talmud, Roman recognition of the Patriarch until the fifth century as head of the homeland Jewish community, and homeland Jews’ massive participation in their own battalions alongside the 614 Persian invaders evidence Jews’ continued homeland presence, initially still as the majority, throughout Roman-Byzantine rule. Scholar Gedaliah Alon meticulously documented that presence in The Jews In Their Land in the Talmudic Age. (In an obiter dictum, Alon asserted that Jewish presence was snuffed out after the seventh century Arab invasion, but I took strenuous issue with that in the following four chapters of my book.)
Did Homeland Jews endure through Muslim Dynasty, Crusader, Mamluk and Turk Empire rule, with Today’s Israel becoming the Land of Israel’s NEXT native state?
Eminent British historian Parkes wrote that while today’s Zionists cite the Maccabees and Bar Kochba, today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds” have been 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.” I end my book by crediting that homeland Jewish endurance as the presence, beacon, magnet making return of persecuted Diaspora Jews possible, even thinkable, and as forming the continuous generational link between ancient Israelites and Israelis today.
And that’s the answer to Israel being mislabeled a “settler-colonial project” needing “dismantling.” “Settler-colonial.” hell – biblical Jewish history Happened, and after that we Never Left. Israel’s our homeland, has been for three thousand years. Some nights I lay awake thinking of all the Jews murdered over the centuries in Muslim and Christian-dominated lands solely for being “outsider” Jews. I ask these murdered Jews if they’d feel “very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel,” as Pew recently asked, if they could exchange places with me in my Jewish American bed, and I don’t need a Pew to write down their responses. Talk about not being “woke.” This, our homeland history, I think, is how we can awaken that sense of homeland and peoplehood connection in the almost half of American Jews who don’t feel such attachment today.