WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: At the end of this missive, I list some of the anti-Jewish homeland campaigns going on in America now. If they perturb you, there’s a way for us grassroots American Jews to do something about it. The language of Arab-Israeli conflict discourse in America is laced with delegitimizing pejoratives, some enumerated below, some even used unthinkingly by Jews. Contest this when you see it. Would it help if we shared occasions of our doing this?
This Week: Guide For the Perturbed
If you’re an American Jewish supporter of our Jewish homeland – its historic Jerusalem capital (Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all), and defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland included – and are not perturbed by the stepped up current campaigns against Israel and Jews, you get this week off from reading this. If you’re still with me, relieve your frustration at seeming inability to do anything by doing something. Be a Word Warrior defending our Jewish people’s historical and legal right to our homeland.
Every time you see or hear one of the totally loaded lexicon’s anti-Jewish homeland poisoned pejoratives – and that’s just what slurs like, e.g., “West Bank …captured in 1967 …1967 borders … settlers and settlements … occupied Palestinian territories … apartheid … settler-colonial project … even ‘the Palestinians,” etc, etc., are – don’t avert your eyes meekly. Append a reader comment to the op-ed or article, email the writer or speaker, or by other means voice your objection. Even pro-Israel American Jews often unthinkingly use these alas too common terms and expressions. There’s a front in contesting our Jewish homeland’s delegitimization in which those on the front lines are not Israelis but us, and that front is terminology misuse in America.
Here we go while you stand on one leg:
Terms Delegitimizing Israel’s 1967 War Gains
“Captured by Israel in 1967”: The media insistently says this to date Jewish connection to Judea-Samaria and even historic Jerusalem (three times Jewish state capital, renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman rule), none of which “the Palestinians” have ever ruled ever, to their capture by Israel in the 1967 war. Wrong by about three thousand years.
“Israel’s 1967 Borders”: They weren’t – either “1967” or “borders.” They were 1949 exclusively military Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines, expressly declared in their defining document not to foreclose either side’s border claims. The media and Israel’s other detractors call those perilous (Eban reputedly called them “Auschwitz lines”) 9-miles-wide in the lowland middle, historic Jerusalem-excluding lines “borders,” because borders, unlike military ceasefire lines, have a gravitas surviving renewed fighting between the two sides. Except to Israel’s defamers, the old defunct 1949 lines, succeeded by Israel’s infinitely more Jewishly meaningful and militarily defensible post-1967 war ceasefire lines, are not among the Holy Land’s holy places.
“Ultranationalists’ Greater Israel”: The media mockingly labels Jews claiming the entirety of the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, as the Jewish homeland as “ultranationalists” claiming areas to which Jews have no homeland claim. Exactly backwards. The original Palestine Mandate recognizing Jews’ historical connection to Palestine and right to reestablish their national home there, calling for Jewish immigration and close settlement of Jews on the land, included Palestine on both sides of the Jordan River, with a proviso allowing Britain to “postpone or withhold” its provisions from the 77% east of the River, which Britain quickly did, creating Arab Transjordan. There was no such proviso pertaining to Palestine west of the River. So it’s our Jewish homeland’s detractors who, in demanding Israeli retreat to the 1949 ceasefire lines, even in Jerusalem, are clamoring for a Lesser Israel.
“Occupied Palestinian Territories”: Wrong on all three slurs. Historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria are not “occupied” by the Jewish people, who have been three times sovereign there and have real historical and legal claim to them. They’re not “Palestinian,” because Palestinian Arabs have never ruled any part of them ever. And they’re not geographically defined “territories,” but arbitrary parts of a defined territory, Palestine west of the River, the land of Israel, marked in Judea-Samaria and inside the city of Jerusalem only by invader-defender ceasefire lines that existed between 1949 and 1967.
“Jewish Settlers and Settlements”: Sometimes in the same sentence, the media lovingly contrasts Jewish “settlers” living in “settlements” with nearby “Palestinian residents” living in “neighborhoods, towns, villages.” It did this to Jews seeking to re-establish a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem from which decades before Jewish residents had been driven by Arabs. Throughout the two millennia of the land of Israel’s successive foreign empire rule, Jews relentlessly returned to Jerusalem whenever the ruler evicted them, and nobody called Jews living there “settlers.”
Terms Delegitimizing the State of Israel’s Legitimacy
“Israel was Founded in 1948; Israel was Created Because of the Holocaust; Israel is ‘the Zionist Entity’”: The Jewish homeland’s detractors use these expressions to deny the Jewish people’s historic connection to the land of Israel by dating today’s Jewish State’s origin to recent historical happenings. The Zionist movement and Palestine Mandate with its Jewish national home preceded the Holocaust. And the Zionist movement didn’t create something new but modernized and reinvigorated a return of Diaspora Jews to the homeland that had never ceased. There is a continuous generational link, not just religious but including through continuous physical homeland presence, between ancient Israelites and Israelis today as inhabitants of the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.
“Palestinian Refugees of the War that Followed Israel’s Creation; the Palestinian Refugee Issue”: First, they weren’t “the Palestinians” yet. During the Mandate, Palestinian Jews were “Palestinians” too. Even the AP said so, and the UN in 1947 called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.” For years the media reveled in “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from the war that followed Israel’s creation.” So, second, there weren’t “millions” because Palestine’s entire 1948 population was less than two million, a good third of it Jews, and not all the Arabs lived in the part that became Israel, and not all of them left. And, third, the war the media calls “the war that followed Israel’s creation” was an Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction, driven back by a homeland army of homeland Jews (not bad for a state that had just been “created”). And, fourth, though the media doesn’t include them in “the Palestinian refugee issue,” the Arab-Israeli conflict created more indigenously Middle-eastern Jewish refugees from vast Arab lands and Iran than Arabs left tiny Israel. Israel absorbed these Jews, whose descendants today are most of the largest segment of Israel’s population, while Arab “hosts,” including in Palestine itself, have isolated generations of descendants of these Arabs in “refugee camps” (not exactly) at international expense, to help keep the conflict alive.
“Israel is an Apartheid State, a Settler-Colonial Project”: Bull. Israeli Arabs are full citizens represented in leading professional and other positions; today an Israeli Arab political party is part of the government[!]. Palestinian Arabs in the areas of the land of Israel that invader Jordan had controlled are not Israeli citizens, but Jordan, sitting on 77% of Palestine, has a Palestinian Arab population majority. “White” Israelis did not come to Israel as colonizers of a colonial power exploiting natives for the benefit of that colonial power. They were fleeing that power back to their homeland where their people, the majority of whom are from Jewish streams that never left the Mideast and North Africa, are the indigenous people.
“The Romans Exiled the Jews, Who Were Gone from Palestine for 1800 Years”: No they didn’t, and no they weren’t. Roman-Byzantine era synagogues and other Jewish remains, Roman recognition of the patriarch as head of the homeland Jewish community, the writing by sages in the land of the Mishna and Palestinian (Jerusalem) Talmud, and joinder of self-mustered battalions of twenty thousand or more homeland Jews with the 614 Persian invaders belie that “the Romans exiled the Jews.” We have evidence today of a hundred ninth (Abbasid rule) century Jewish communities. Crusaders acknowledged Jews, Turks and Arabs fought them in Jerusalem and that Jews fighting alone “courageously” held them off in Haifa for a month. We have much evidence of Jewish presence in their four holy cities – Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron – and in Galilee farming villages and elsewhere in the land during the six succeeding centuries of non-Arab Mamluk and Turkish rule.
And If Not Now, When?
Ok, I’m obsessed, Gentle Reader, with the urgency of us grassroots American Jews standing up against all these anti-Jewish homeland canards.
Take Jonathan Tobin’s JNS column today, Friday, which came out while I’m writing this, titled Is There Still Room for Zionist Jews on the American Left? It seems some 200 liberal groups are holding a Washington rally Saturday promoting the Democrats’ version of election integrity and DC statehood. It seems an environmental group just pulled out, protesting inclusion in the rally of three Jewish groups – the Jewish Council on Public Affairs (JCPA), the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (RAC), and National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) – “because the fight for statehood and sovereignty are incompatible with Zionism.” That both the Reform movement and National Council of Jewish Women were signatories of the infamous 2019 letter of liberal Jewish groups to President Trump calling for a “two-state solution” with borders that “hew precisely to the 1967 borders” save for any agreed “territorial adjustments,” and called for President Trump to oppose “annexation by Israel of any territory in the West Bank,” didn’t count with these environmental folks, and if you want something scarier still, there are two Jewish groups in that Saturday rally group that did pass muster as I guess “non-Zionist” – Workers Circle and Americans For Peace Now.
Need some more? Last month Jewish Congressman Andy Levin, flanked in a news conference with Rep. Alan Lowenthal, Rep. Sara Jacobs, the CEO of Peace Now and President of J Street, introduced a “Two-State Solution Act” so restrictive and hostile to Israel that Prof. Dershowitz, who goes for “two states for two peoples” wrote an article condemning it.
Need more? President Biden, over Israel’s objection, is threatening to open an unprecedented consulate, maybe two consulates, to “the Palestinians” in Israel’s capital, Jerusalem.
More? Friday’s Jewish Voice carried a Free Beacon article stating that more than 90 workers at Google and more than 300 at Amazon had signed a letter to their employers calling on them to cut ties with Israel in a cloud data project. The next day a website – “No Tech For Apartheid” – was launched, “heeding the call.”
More? On Friday, ZOA issued a statement criticizing the U.S. Ambassador to the UN for having “exaggerated and condemned (rare to non-existent) ‘violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers in the West Bank against Palestinians and their property’ – but said nothing about Palestinian Arab terrorists’ daily, too often deadly, shooting, firebombing, boulder-throwing, car-ramming and pipe-bombing attacks on Jews.”
More Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, mom, please!
We grassroots American Jews need to stand up. Would it help if we shared occasions when we do so, so we’d each feel like a little less lonely voice crying out all alone in the wilderness? Perhaps, we could share on our website. Our home page motto says “If you forfeit the language, you forfeit your heritage and history.” Is that not what’s going on now?