#1086 11/14/21 – This Week in the Jewish Homeland Word Warriors’ Workshop

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Should American Jews and our institutions join in pressuring Israel to negotiate a “two-state solution” with “the Palestinians”?  I don’t think we should do that.  Here’s why.

This Week in the Jewish Homeland Word Warriors’ Workshop

When I ran a list of Jewish homeland-denigrating dirty words in #1083 three weeks ago, I separated them into two groups – those denigrating Jewish claim to the core areas of our Jewish homeland – Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem – the IDF liberated in 1967, and those delegitimizing our Jewish homeland’s very right to exist.

America, which is threatening to open a consulate in Jerusalem’s heart to Palestinian Arabs, undermining united Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city, and is “deeply concerned about the Israeli government’s plan to advance thousands of settlement units” thereby damaging “the prospects for a two-state solution” (TOI, 10/26/21, Biden Administration Issues Harshest Critique Yet On Israeli Settlement Building), this week backed off backing Israel at the UN, abstaining on a General Assembly resolution endorsing, 160-1-9, Arab refugees’ descendants’ Jewish state-ending “right of return.”  So America, alas, is not these days standing with Israel against either “occupied territories” or even “right to exist” attacks.

Jonathan Tobin had a thought-provoking JNS column Monday, Is There a Future in Bipartisan Advocacy for Israel?, wrestling with whether AIPAC overly pursues seeking bipartisanship at the expense of working more with the GOP, which currently is more uniformly pro-Israel.  Tobin argues, “In American politics, change is a constant” and concludes that “in the long run, the pro-Israel community will be stronger if AIPAC is capable of vindicating its bipartisan strategy.”   Prof. Dershowitz made that “bipartisan” case at a ZOA dinner in New York I attended, and I agree that he and Tobin are right that American Jews and our organizations should seek support of our Jewish homeland’s legitimacy and security by solid consensus in both American political parties.

But, and I think that this is a big “but,” we should not seek political parties’ and others’ support of Israel by diluting the definition of what constitutes support.  This includes American Jews not pressuring or encouraging other Americans to pressure political positions on Israel which Israelis oppose as diminishing their State’s security and/or Jewishness.

This is what it says under Promoting Peace under Key Issues under Policy Agenda on AIPAC’s website:

“America can play a central role in helping create the conditions for a lasting peace – including a negotiated two-state agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.  A viable two-state agreement is only attainable if America’s support is ironclad and the Jewish state knows it can take risks for peace because its ally and partner has its back.”

This is the comment I posted on JNS under that article:

“Jonathan’s right that it’s ‘both premature and unwise to completely write off AIPAC,’ but in recognizing that ‘In American politics, change is a constant,’ Jonathan doesn’t mention such recognition’s significance to a ‘key issue’ on AIPAC’s policy agenda on its website, ‘a negotiated two-state agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.’ AIPAC says this is ‘only attainable if America’s support for Israel is ironclad,’ but while ironclad support for Israel may well change, an inside-the-land-of-Israel ‘two-state solution,’ once implemented, cannot be changed. What then for our less secure, less Jewishly meaningful Jewish homeland of Israel when that happens?”

It’s true that AIPAC’s website says “a negotiated two-state solution,” giving Israel bargaining room in the framing of that solution, but it’s the type of solution – “two-states” with “the Palestinians,” as opposed, e.g., to Rabin’s vision in his final statement to the Knesset of “less than a state,” or recognition that Palestine has been partitioned between Arabs (Jordan) and Jews (Israel) – that is being imposed.   By me, AIPAC, of all American Jewish institutions, save maybe the Reform and Conservative movements, should not seek to straightjacket Israelis’ bargaining room to a type of peace agreement which most Israelis oppose.

Ok, I titled this week’s email “This Week in the Jewish Homeland’s Word Warriors’ Workshop.”  But does “two-state solution” really fit in this “workshop,” in which we hope to make plain to people that the whole lexicon of Arab-Israeli conflict terms and expressions is stacked against the Jewish State?  I think it does.

“Two-state solution” is a Dirty Word.  It implies that no Arab Palestine state already exists, while Jordan not just sits on more than three-quarters of Palestine land, but has a majority population of Palestinian Arabs.  Pretending that these geographic and demographic facts do not exist is akin to the United Nations this week 160-1-9 pretending that the Arab-Israeli conflict produced Arab (who btw mostly left Israel at invading Arabs’ instance) but not any sans-UNRWA Israel-absorbed indigenously Middle-eastern Jewish refugees expelled from Arab lands.  (And that latter is a Big Deal.  There were more Mizrahi Jewish than Arab refugees, and today that stream of Israelis descended from Arab land Jews is Israel’s biggest demographic stream.  Take that, howlers of Israel as an “apartheid settler-colonial” state.)

PS:  We invite readers of this to join those who’ve taken the “Word Warrior” pledge (full text in #1084 under Media Watch on our www.factsonisrael.com), not to use Jewish homeland-delegitimizing dirty words, to object to such use by organizations to which you belong, to seek to correct such use by fellow grassroots American Jews and others with whom you converse, to post comments to internet articles using Jewish homeland-delegitimizing dirty words, and to share your actions with others.  Just reply to this email: “I took the pledge.”  j