WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Oh, no, another poll revealing non-attachment to Israel of many American Jews. TOI’s David Horovitz says Israel needs to take notice, but the ball’s in our court. What’s a grassroots American Jew who feels attachment to Israel to do?
I think three things: One, badger a Jew needing to do so to read a book movingly capturing the incomparable conviction and courage of Jews who accomplished and preserve Israel’s sovereign rebirth in our time (I make a couple suggestions); two, become a Word Warrior, totally rejecting the loaded lexicon of anti-Jewish homeland pejoratives; and three, unequivocally advocate our people’s claim to our homeland.
This Week: “Genocide, Apartheid?” A Poll of American Jews that We American Jews Cannot Ignore
Times of Israel editor David Horovitz penned a warning to his fellow Israelis this week about a new poll of American Jews: Genocide, Apartheid? A Poll Israel Cannot Allow Itself To Ignore. That poll of American Jewish voters (not without its critics of its question-framing) found that significant percentages of American Jews believe Israel is “apartheid,” is “genocidal” in its treatment of Palestinian Arabs, and “has no right to exist.” Horovitz says “Israel would help its standing if it explained itself more effectively.”
Duh, but though some things – like whether Israelis should meekly walk out of historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria in an internationally-demanded western Palestine “two-state solution” – are Israelis’ to grapple with, other things – e.g., our own American Jewish community’s support vel non of our people’s Jewish homeland of Israel – are ours.
Many years ago, then Jewish Exponent, now JNS, editor Jonathan Tobin told me the biggest victims of anti-Israel media bias are American Jews. I half-believed Jonathan then. But last week I cited another recent poll of American Jews that found that only 58% of us are “very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel.” And I also quoted well-known columnist Melanie Phillips citing especially egregious anti-Israel media bias examples over the years and concluding:
“Since then, the inflammatory incitement against Israel by the BBC, the New York Times and much of the mainstream media has gotten far worse. Yet with some heroic exceptions, this relentless onslaught has been received with near silence by Jewish community leaders.
“This media malpractice is not a marginal issue. It is a weapon of war. And it’s time for a proper counterattack.”
I fully believe Jonathan now. And I share Melanie Phillips’ lament over our Diaspora Jewish communal leaders’ lack of effective active response. (I felt that way in 2002 when as thebn grassroots Brith Sholom’s vice president I was one of three speakers at a grassroots groups’ protest on the Inquirer’s sidewalk). So what’s a grassroots American Jew to do, who believes not just that the media is biased against Israel but that many of our own fellow American Jews are insufficiently emotionally attached to our people’s historic homeland of Israel?
One obvious answer is “monitor the media,” and though I of course have no objection to that, having done so myself, I think our immediate obligation is to work on the Israel perceptions of many of our fellow grassroots American Jews. I suggest three things toward that end.
Go Read a Book
First, I would have us, individually, one-on-one, attempt to deepen awareness by American Jews who lack attachment to Israel of the incredible courage and commitment it took to bring about what Krauthammer rightly called that “miraculous” event of our time, our homeland’s sovereign rebirth after almost two thousand years, during all of which time it was both devoutly prayed for and desperately needed. Two grippingly readable books that capture these Jews’ own words are Yoram Kaniuk’s Commander of the Exodus, on Yossi Harel’s and survivors’ and Palestinian Jews’ participation in the Aliyah Bet, and Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate, in the words of participants in the Six Day War. Read/reread these books and press them upon your American Jewish friends needing emotional-attachment-to-Israel booster shots.
Become a Word Warrior
Second, I would have each of us become fanatic Word Warriors, not just not using ourselves, but strongly remonstrating against American Jews’ public and private use of any of the terms in the loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland delegitimizing pejoratives, all designed for that purpose. I’ve railed against such terms – e.g., “West Bank … East Jerusalem … Israel’s 1967 borders … Israel’s 1948 creation and founding … Israel’s 1967 capture/seizure of the West Bank and East Jerusalem … Greater Israel … al-Aqsa mosque compound … Zionist entity ,,, settler-colonial project … apartheid state … settlers and settlements … occupied territories … Palestinian territories … occupied Palestinian territories … The Palestinians” etc., etc.
Make Our Land of Israel Homeland Case
And third, I would have each of us make the plain simple case for the Jewish people’s land of Israel homeland – all of it, including its meaningful “core of the core,” historic Jerusalem, and its defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland. Our adversaries don’t call these areas “disputed.” They call them theirs, “occupied Palestinian territories.” E,g., UNSC 2334. Our counter-case is not to say “UNSC 242 doesn’t say ‘the,’” but to say the entirety of the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan River, is legally and historically Ours. And you can/should say this even if you’d part with the meaningful and defensible heart of it in a [never mind Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan, 78% of the Palestine Mandate] so-called “two-state” solution. Make what you’d give up worth something.
I wrote a book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, documenting historian Parkes’ assertion that Jews’ continuous post-biblical homeland presence wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.” Jews have indeed continuously lived there, physically maintaining all through the centuries our homeland claim, ultimately redeemed as today’s Israel’s 1948 independence as the land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea. But during those eighteen hundred intervening years, most Jews did live in Muslim and Christian-ruled lands. Not just during the Holocaust, but all during those long dark centuries, no people on earth suffered such persecution as we Jews in those lands. No people has greater need of its homeland, just as no people has a longer deeper connection to its homeland than us.
Today’s all-Arab Jordan, with its Palestinian Arab population majority, comprised 78% of the Palestine Mandate. Its excision from the Mandate, leaving just the 22% west of the Jordan River for the Mandate’s “Jewish national home,” effectively partitioned Palestine, more than equitably to Arabs, between Arabs and Jews.
That Israel, the land’s next native state after Roman destroyed Jewish Judaea, and where Jews have continually lived during and since biblical times, is and has historically been our Jewish homeland is the case that Jews the world over must make, and we here have to make it first to our less than emotionally attached to Israel fellow American Jews. American Jews’ support of Israel is not a favor by us to Israelis, but our obligation not just to those who courageously redeemed and preserve our homeland’s sovereign independence, but to all those, who’d change places with Israelis or us in a heartbeat, who over the centuries lived persecuted minority lives in others’ lands and were prevented by our homeland’s foreign empire rule from going home.