WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Two major media opinion pieces this week strongly answer the canard that Israel is a “colonial” state. But to really answer the “colonial” canard effectively, we ourselves must ditch the dirty words – e.g., “settlements … THE Palestinians … 1948 founding of Israel” etc. – that lend this canard credence. In the “Workshop,” respect Word Warrior Ernest’s perseverance and reflect on what the result of his effort shows.
Israel as a “Colonial” State: The Dirtiest of Dirty Words
A pair of opinion pieces, one in the Washington Post and one in the Jerusalem Post, caught my eye this week, both answering forthrightly the canard – by me the most delegitimizing of all attacks on Jews’ historic homeland of Israel – that Israel is a “colonial” state. Both pieces make the same answer – we’re the natives – but I’d push that point further. We – both Diaspora Jews and Israelis – must ditch all the dirty words, even the worst of which we ourselves use, that lend credence to that “colonial” canard.
The Washington Post opinion piece – Opinion: In D.C., American Jews Continue To Face Antisemitism Unabated, Brooke Goldstein, Tuesday, Nov. 16, dealt with the DC chapter of a climate change organization backing out of a statehood for DC rally in protest of the presence in that rally of three Jewish organizations it claims support “colonial project” Israel. In answering that “Sunrise DC decided to grab cheap headlines by taking a shot at the Jews, the world’s favorite historical punching bag,” Ms. Goldstein, Executive Director of the Lawfare Project, answered “Israel is the Jewish ancestral homeland and Jews are indigenous to Judea,” and “Zionism is the political movement ensuring Jewish sovereignty in a land Jews have continuously called home” for millennia. Rightly calling out leftists’ utter hypocrisy, Ms. Goldstein asserted:
“Being anti-Zionist is the antithesis of supporting indigenous rights and statehood for indigenous people. Zionism is the ultimate of progressive values in its recognition of Jews as indigenous to the land of Israel.”
Thursday’s Jerusalem Post opinion piece, by Marc Greendorfer, President of the Zachor Legal Institute, a civil rights non-profit, It’s Trendy to Label Israel with Negative Words and Phrases – Opinion, likewise took issue with “colonialism” and “settler-colonialism.” He writes that “the only way one can accuse Jews of being colonialists in Israel is to deny thousands of years of history and claim that modern Jews are not related to historical Jews,” that such accusations, which are “bereft of historical, legal or scientific basis,” are made solely to claim falsely “that Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel and Jewish national history is illegitimate.” He observes that while some Jews lived for generations in Europe, they originated in Israel, and Mizrahi Jews “never left the region and constitute a large portion of the Jewish population of Israel.” He criticizes
“the frequent, and historically inaccurate, use of the term settlements to refer to the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria, leading to the assumption that simply by combining the two buzzwords of colonialist and settler to Jews, they must be settler-colonialists.”
The media gleefully contrasts, sometimes in the same sentence, Jewish “settlements” versus nearby “Palestinian towns, villages, neighborhoods.” By using “settlers” and “settlements” ourselves, we invite such indigenous-outsider contrasts by those not well disposed towards us, let alone inviting the “settler-colonialist” combination Greendorfer cites.
Yet our folly runs deeper than that. The place is called “Palestine,” and we ourselves go around calling Arabs who live there not “Arab Palestinians” or “Palestinian Arabs” but “THE Palestinians.” The media has seized on this too, characterizing the UN in 1947 as having sought to partition Palestine “between Jews and Palestinians.” Actually, the UN didn’t. Over and over in its Palestine partition resolution, the UN said “the Arab state and the Jewish state” (emphasis added), and even called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.” During the Mandate, the AP has acknowledged (12/11/11), Jews, Christians and Muslims living in Palestine were all called “Palestinians.” Indeed, we Jews used it most – the Palestine Post (today’s Jerusalem Post), the Palestine Symphony, Electric Company, etc. We have to take back Jewish homeland equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian.”
Our folly runs deeper still. As historian James Parkes decades ago pointed out, we Zionist Jews are accessories to the canard Greendorfer warned us of this week, “that modern Jews aren’t related to historical Jews.” Parkes wrote in Whose Land, A History of the Peoples of Palestine, p. 266, that by harping on exile and almost two millennia later return, we open ourselves to the argument that the Jewish connection had long been broken, that today’s Jews have come to a land that in the meantime had become homogenously Arab. Instead, wrote Parkes, we should recognize and assert that we never fully left, that “those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement,” wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.” Is what Parkes wrote true? “Trust me, I wrote a book on it” – Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine (Amazon).
The Jewish homeland delegitimizers’ shorthand slur for disassociating today’s Israelis from Israelites of Old and Jews who lived in our homeland during the land’s uninterrupted foreign empire rule centuries between ancient Judaea’s destruction by Rome and today’s Israel’s independence in 1948 as the land’s next native state, is “Israel was founded in 1948.” The Hell it was. But just this week (see “Word Warrior Workshop” below) a Canadian anti-semitism-fighting organization sent out a flyer announcing an exhibition next week on events in Israel in 1948, using the expression “In 1948 the State of Israel was founded” and titled “1948 The Founding Of Israel.” (The flyer beneath this says “the reconstitution of the State of Israel,” but the bigger font damage was done.)
How urgent is it we contest this “colonial” canard? This month the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution 160-1-9 endorsing Palestinian Arabs’ Jewish State-ending “Right of Return.” The “1” was Israel. The 9 abstainers were the US, Canada and some Pacific Islanders’ states. Notwithstanding [a] three thousand years’ thrice-sovereign homeland Jewish presence; [b] San Remo and the Palestine Mandate’s “Jewish national home”; [c] the Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict having created more Israel-absorbed Jewish refugees from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel; and [d] Palestinian Arabs being the majority population of an Arab state, Jordan, sitting on three-quarters of the Palestine Mandate’s land, not one state on the planet supported the Jewish claim to western Palestine, the land of Israel, which Palestinian Arabs have never ruled ever.
This Week in the Jewish Homeland Word Warriors’ Workshop
Ernest K. has been a foe of “the 1948 founding of Israel” for a long time. Years ago, he objected to that mischaracterization in the Philadelphia Inquirer. This week he complained to a Canadian anti-semitism-fighting organization that publicized a Jewish German professor’s graphical exhibition in Canada next week of Israel’s 1948 attainment of independence. The exhibition “has travelled across Germany for 2 years. Seen in over 60 communities, this will be the first virtual English presentation of this exceptional exhibit.”
This is the flyer:
“CAEF
Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation
Presents a Virtual Visit to
A World Class Exhibition
1948
The Founding of Israel
. . .
In 1948 the State of Israel was founded.
. . .
This webtalk presents Jewish history over the centuries
and the reconstitution of the State of Israel using
beautiful exhibition graphics.”
Reflect on the following exchanges between Ernest K. and CAEF. They are perhaps open to two interpretations, but neither of them good.
Ernest complained about “1948 The Founding of Israel” to CAEF’s Executive Director: “Words matter – Israel was not founded in 1948. Jews should not be using language such as this any more than referring to Israel towns as settlements, as well as the ‘West Bank.’”
CAEF replied: “I am totally in agreement and always watch words and try to avoid any of our enemies’ language. In this case, I am only using the words that are in the material to be presented by Dr. Osterer, also a Jew, isn’t going to suggest that Israel only began in 1948. He covers its early history to some extent and moves people to understanding what 1948 signifies.”
Ernest next: “Your flier says: ‘1948 The Founding of Israel.’ If I knew how to contact Dr. Osterer and DEIN, the sponsoring organization, I would. I am unable to find any contact information. I believe it imperative that the speaker and the sponsoring organization send them a correction with the appropriate information.”
CAEF next: “I spoke with Dr. Osterer and we have a bad English translation because the word in German is ‘resurrection’ not ‘founding.’ so he will explain that. We agreed that the word “reconstituted” is appropriate. He is well informed on the legal and historical facts.”
CAEF then apparently emailed Ernest the unchanged same flyer, to which Ernest replied: “It is the same flier. I fear there is the same degree of PC in Canada as in the US. 1948 was the fulfillment of the Balfour Declaration. Israel was not founded, established nor created in 1948. People who should know better don’t. Ernest”
This morning, Sunday, Nov. 21, I checked the caef.ca website. The same flyer titled “1948 The Founding of Israel” is there. Under “Upcoming Events”: “November 25, 2021: 1948: An Exhibition on the Founding of Israel.” Disappointing, but I think a second interpretation is plausible – inertia; the effort and expense of redoing the flyer and event notice a few days before the event outweighed in CAEF’s view the acknowledged mistranslation and “complete agreement” that it’s misleading. Let there be no doubt, though, that CAEF is indubitably among the Good Guys. On its website, e.g., under “Mission Statement”: “CAEF exposes the dangers of AntiZionism which are Antisemitism, promotes Jewish Rights to the Land of Israel, and Debunks the many Arab Palestinian Lies.” [Emphasis original] Also on its website: plenty of stuff to back that up. De novo, no doubt, the flyer would have been accurately phrased. But that derisive laughter in the background? It’s not coming from me.
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