WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Current attacks aren’t just against Israel “occupying” areas over the 1949 lines, but against the Jewish homeland per se as “colonial … racist … apartheid” in exploiting and oppressing “the Palestinians,” its “indigenous population.” We must make clear that historically and legally the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, is the homeland of ours.
A New Year’s Resolution for Us Grassroots American Jews: Make Clear the Land of Israel is the Homeland of Jews
Two articles this week, on Algemeiner and United With Israel, deal with current attacks on Israel, not for “occupying” areas over the old defunct 1949 ceasefire lines, but for being a “colonial … apartheid … racist” usurper of land “stolen” from “its indigenous population” of “the Palestinians.”
The United With Israel article, AOC Under Fire After Staffer Calls Israel ‘Racist European Ethnostate Built on Stolen Land’, says Fox News obtained screen shots of a now-deleted Instagram post of a legislative assistant of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez which said “Israel is a racist European ethnostate built on stolen land from its indigenous population.” The Algemeiner opinion article, No Surprise: More Antisemitism At Duke, by Amy Rosenthal, MD, former Assistant Professor of Medicine at Duke University and co-founder of North Carolina Coalition for Israel (NCCI, hopefully more about which in weeks to come), deals with Duke University Press, with a history of anti-Israel articles, seeking contributions to a forthcoming symposium, “Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine.” The article also cites statements by Students for Justice in Palestine speakers at Duke’s Israel Apartheid Week in 2019 that “they would only use the word ‘Palestine’ while pointing to a map of Israel.”
There is only one answer to such increasingly vociferous “Israel as a settler-colonial project” attacks such as these that strike at the heart of our homeland’s legitimacy, and that is to make clear the historical and legal bases of the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan River, as the Jews’, not Arabs’, homeland. We must make three points: [1] that Jews, not Arabs, are the land of Israel’s indigenous people; [2] that Israelis are not “white Europeans”; and [3] that Palestine has been more than equitably to the Arabs divided between Arabs and Jews.
[1] Palestinian Arabs are Not “THE Palestinians”
It ought not to be terribly difficult for us to make the case that Jews, not Arabs, are the land of Israel’s indigenous people. The Jewish people has been sovereign in the land of Israel three times, during the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah, during the Maccabee-Hasmonean kingdom, and from 1948 to the present. And although most Jews lived outside the land following the Roman destruction, as historian Parkes put it, the homeland-claiming Jews who tenaciously remained in the land all through the ensuing centuries, in spite of every foreign empire ruler discouragement, wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.” (On homeland Jews’ continuous post-biblical physical presence, see also Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine (Amazon))
Palestinian Arabs have been sovereign there Never, and foreign Arabs only between 638 and 1099 (i.e., between the European Romans-Byzantines and the European Crusaders; neither the Mamluks nor the Ottomans who followed the Crusaders for two and four centuries respectively were Arab).
But it’s difficult for us to make this historical Jewish homeland case while we ourselves go around calling our Palestinian Arab counter-claimants to Palestine “THE Palestinians.” The AP acknowledged (12/11/11) that during the Mandate, “Muslims, Christians and Jews living there were all referred to as Palestinians” (emphasis added). Indeed, during the Mandate, as David Bar-Illan repeatedly pointed out in his Jerusalem Post “Eye On the Media” column, the term “Palestinian” was much more used by the homeland’s Jews in reference to themselves than by Arabs. The United Nations, in its 1947 Palestine partition resolution, called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.” The media says the partition resolution sought to create in Palestine “Palestinian” and Jewish states, but over and over it says “Arab” and Jewish states.
There’s Jewish equity in the names “Palestine” and “Palestinian,” but they’ve been hijacked by Arabs, as Begin pointed out in his Foreword to the second edition of Katz’s Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine. We have to reclaim it, first, by recognizing we’re virtually conceding our case by ourselves calling our Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict adversary “The Palestinians.”
[2] Israelis are Not White Europeans
At the mention of “Arab-Israeli conflict refugees,” most Americans would think of two groups, European Holocaust survivors absorbed by Israel and Palestinian Arabs who “fled or were forced from their homes” in what the media miscalls “the war that followed Israel’s creation.” That war was, of course, a multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction the very day it declared its independence in 1948. What most Americans would be surprised to learn, and learn this from us they should, is that more indigenously Middle-eastern Jews were displaced in that war and its wake from dhimmi lives they’d led for centuries in vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel, and that Israel absorbed the bulk of these Jews.
And so it was a descendant of one of these Mizrahi Jews who answered Congresswoman Octavio-Cortez, as recorded in this week’s United With Israel article:
“Sia Kodestani, an American Jew born in Iran, tweeted to the Congresswoman, ‘Your staffer Hussain Altamimi says Israel is ‘a racist European ethnostate.’ That’s wrong for many reasons, and it erases Mizrahi Jews like me. A majority of Jewish Israelis are descendants of 850,000 Jews violently expelled from Arab countries. Will you call him out?”
A few years ago, I attended a small meeting with a rabbi from Israel on how we can try to get more liberals in the West to be supportive of small Israel in its existential struggle against large Arab and other Muslim adversary nations. The rabbi believed, and I agree, that liberals are supportive of indigenous peoples struggling for independence in their homelands. Our adversaries have successfully instilled in Western mindsets an impression of a dominating Israel oppressing weak “Palestinian” natives in an “Israeli-Palestinian,” not “Arab-Israeli” conflict. We have to make clear who’s the David.
[3] Palestine Has Been Divided, More Than Equitably to Arabs, Between Arabs and Jews
Even if, like most American Jews, you support a western Palestine “two-state solution,” make what you’d give up of the land of Israel mean something. Make the case that today’s Jordan sits on 78% of the original Palestine Mandate with its Jewish national home and close settlement of Jews on the land, and that Jordan’s majority population considers itself Palestinian. Jordan is an Arab Palestinian state, and Jordan and Israel, 78% and 22% of Palestine respectively, do in fact constitute a two-state division of Palestine between Arabs and Jews.
So Israel claiming the entirety of that 22% is not some ultra-nationalist claim to some media-mocked “Greater Israel” to which the Jewish people has no historical or legal claim. The old defunct ceasefire lines of 1949, expressly declared in their defining document not to constitute political borders, are not among the Holy Land’s holy places. The Jewish people through the Jewish State have the strongest claim to historic Jerusalem – three times Jewish state (and no other) native state capital, with renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman rule – and to Judea-Samaria (still called by those Hebrew origin names, not “West Bank,” by the UN in 1947) hill country heartland with their natural defensible border. Again dividing that 22% left for Jews from Palestine’s first partition between Arabs and Jews would leave a Lesser Israel Jewish national home.
A New Year’s Resolution for Us Grassroots American Jews
Let us not react to this “racist European ethnostate built on stolen land from its indigenous population,” this “Decolonial Guide to Palestine,” this “Israel as a settler-colonial project” by averting our eyes. Let us make clear that Jews, not Palestinian Arabs parading as “The Palestinians,” are the land of Israel’s indigenous people, the largest segment of whom never left the Mideast, and that Israel sovereign in the entirety of the land of Israel, historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria included, still leaves an existing 78% – 22% two-state division of Palestine respectively between Arabs and Jews.
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