#1079 9/26/21 – Fighting Back Against Fighting Words Flung at Us in the Two-State Solution-Demanding Campaign

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  It’s that time again for world leaders’ General Assembly speeches extolling “the two-state solution,” and now a House bill pushing it, all of it laced with pejoratives.  We have to fight the dirty words, but beyond that join with Israelis in claiming the land of Israel, all of it, as our people’s secure, meaningful and expressly Jewish State. 

Fighting Back Against Fighting Words Flung at Us in the Two-State Solution-Demanding Campaign

Ah, the brightly colored leaves and crisp clear air of autumn.  Open season on deer in the woods, and on Israel at the UN.  President Biden advocated “the Two-State Solution” in his General Assembly address.  Palestinian Authority President Forever Abbas used his UN speech to threaten (Haaretz, 9/24/21) that the PA would “reverse its recognition of the 1967 borders” and go after Israel in the International Criminal Court if Israel “did not withdraw from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem within one year.”  Jordan warned the status quo is unsustainable.

Not to be outdone by goings-on in New York, down in Washington Democratic Congressmen including Andy Levin, Alan Lowenthal and Sara Jacobs (pictured in 9/24/21 Times of Israel photo holding “Two State Solution Act sign alongside J Street President Jeremy Ben Ami) introduced a bill, “strongly opposed by more moderate Democrats,” with all sorts of restrictions on Israel and defining “occupied Palestinian territories:

Section 10 (2): “OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES – The term ‘occupied Palestinian territories’ means the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza.”

Above, I titled this week’s rantings and ravings by me “Fighting Words ….”  “Fighting words,” said the United States Supreme Court in Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire in 1942, are words which “by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace” and are “a category of speech that is unprotected by the First Amendment.”

So take a look at those words italicized by me in those brief paragraphs quoting those nice folks above:  “the 1967 borders … the West Bank … East Jerusalem … Two-State Solution … occupied Palestinian territories …the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

Really?   Those of you who’ve put up with me now for two or more weeks know

***  that “the 1967 borders” are fighting words for the perilous 1949 ceasefire lines, expressly declared in their defining document not to be political borders;

***  that “the West Bank” was a name coined by the invader Jordan in 1950 to disassociate from Jews what had been known by the Hebrew-origin biblical names “Judea and Samaria” for millennia, including by the UN itself in 1947;

***  that “East Jerusalem” came into existence in 1948 when invader Jordan seized the historic part of the city, with all of its holy places, and went out of existence when Jordan was evicted from everywhere west of the Jordan River by Israel in the again-initiated-by-Jordan fighting between Israel and Jordan in 1967;

*** that the name “the Two-State Solution” implies that there does not already exist in Palestine, which there does, an Arab state, sitting on 78% of the Palestine Mandate, with a substantial Palestinian Arab majority population;

*** that the “occupied Palestinian territories” are not “occupied” by the Jews, who are there by millennia-long historical presence internationally recognized by the Palestine Mandate calling for reconstituting their national home there, and hence are not “Palestinian,” and are not even distinct geographic “territories,” but portions of an existing territory, Palestine west of the River, defined not by geography but exclusively by long-defunct 1949 military ceasefire lines that snaked through it; and

*** that “the West Bank, including East Jerusalem” compounds two sets of misleading fighting words to make doubly sure historic Jerusalem is doubly inoculated against infection of association with Jews.  The historic city is “East” Jerusalem in “the West Bank.”

American Jews, which appears to be most of them, who favor “the Two-State Solution” need to grasp vividly what the Jewish people’s homeland of that “Two-State Solution” would be – nine miles wide in the lowland middle sans historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all) – militarily indefensible and Jewishly meaningless.  Is that what the century-long struggle for fulfillment in our time of the Dream of Generations for our homeland’s sovereign redemption has been all about – a ghetto remnant of the historic land of Israel, of the Palestine Mandate’s Jewish national home?  While “the Palestinians” have a Palestinian-Arab Palestine place extending from easternmost Jordan to within nine miles of the sea, and Gaza?

That is exactly the Jewish State defined both by UNSC 2334 and by today’s “The Two-State Solution Act” of Congressman Levin et ilk – “a bill that affirms a two-state resolution at the pre-1967 lines and restricts Israeli use of arms” (Jerusalem Post, 9/23/21).

Some of you know that I wrote a book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine (Amazon).  I’d run across what historian James Parkes had written in Whose Land: A History of the Peoples of Palestine, in which he asserted (p. 266) that the continuous tenacious presence of the Yishuv, the homeland’s Jewish community, all through the foreign empire rule post-biblical centuries, in spite of every discouragement, had written today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”  So fascinated was I by Parkes’ assertion that I determined to trace it – from the Romans’ destruction of ancient Judaea all through that continuous foreign rule until Israel’s independence in 1948 as the land’s next native state.

I want to tell you one of the things that I learned researching and writing that book.  We know that the Jews lived permanently persecuted lives as homeland-less outsiders over the centuries in Christian and Muslim lands.  But what’s less known is this:  Over those eighteen hundred years of the Jewish homeland’s foreign empire rule, Jews were subjected to such persecution in our people’s own home – both by the foreign rulers themselves and by other inhabitants of the land.  It went on under every foreign ruler, from the Romans-Byzantines through the Turks and finally British, often accompanied by barriers against Jews who were being persecuted elsewhere going home. Parkes was not engaging in hyperbole in calling the homeland Jews’ tenacious continuing presence “in spite of every discouragement.”  The wonder is not that there were only 600,000 Jews, along with a million or so Arabs, living in Palestine in 1948.  The wonder is that there were still any Jews there at all.

American Jews uncomfortable with Israel’s recent Nation State Law as being, in their view, inconsistent with it being “democratic,” such as by not making Arabic an “official” language, need to appreciate that Israel isn’t America.  Like so many peoples’ homeland nations that expressly declare themselves Christian or Islamic, Israel’s raison d’etre is to be Jewish.  This is not something new, nor is Arab opposition to it. British Foreign Minister Bevin, no friend of ours, put it this way in 1947:

“There are in Palestine about 1,200,000 Arabs [many say more like only a million] and 600,000 Jews.  For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state.  For the Arabs the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.”  [Great Britain, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, vol.433, cl. 988, quoted in Bell, Terror Out of Zion, p. 188]

A secure and meaningful Jewish state, coextensive with the historic land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, does not deprive Palestinian Arabs of a Palestine homeland – the 78% of it east of the Jordan.   Indeed, we American Jews have to fight pejoratives like this week’s “the 1967 borders … the West Bank … East Jerusalem … Two-State Solution … occupied Palestinian territories …the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” and all the other dirty words designed to delegitimize our people’s Jewish homeland of Israel.  But we can’t stop with complaining about pejoratives.  We have to join Israelis in affirmatively claiming – through historical presence internationally recognized in San Remo and the Mandate – the land of Israel, Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem included, “from the River to the Sea” as the other side equally immodestly puts their claim – as the Jewish people’s secure and meaningful Jewish national home.