WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The US-Britain-Russia territorial integrity guarantee to Ukraine if it gave up its nuclear weapons has just proved as enduring as the Palestine Mandate and UN border presence of the eve of the Six Day War. Israel cannot go back to the vulnerable 1949 ceasefire lines, though even many American Jews go along with the UN and EU that it should. Some of these Jews can be persuaded, I think, of our people’s entitlement and need of a strong Jerusalem-based Jewish homeland national state through exposure to heroic first-person accounts of the struggle for its redemption and preservation, and its Ingathering of the long-maltreated Exiles from West and East.
Lessons From Ukraine For Israel and Us
Small Nations Must Rely on Themselves
Two internet articles this week reference lessons in today’s Russia-Ukraine conflict for both Israel and us.
A Wall Street Journal article Wednesday, How Ukraine was Betrayed in Budapest, is subtitled “Kyiv gave up its nuclear weapons in return for security assurances. So much for that.” The US, Britain and Russia committed to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” The article doesn’t mention Israel, but warns that small countries turn to self-reliance when great powers fail to perform their commitments.
The second article, Tuesday in Israel Hayom, titled Is Ukraine Heading for a Rude Awakening?, very much references Israel, in that same vein that small nations must primarily rely on themselves. It cites the US embargo on arms to Israel in its desperate War of Independence in 1948, and even when the US was answering the massive Russian arms airlifts to attacking Egypt and Syria in 1973, “Europe turned its back on Jerusalem by refusing to allow American planes that carried supplies for the Israel Defense Forces to refuel [that’s all] in its territories.”
The Jewish people’s homeland claim to the land of Israel is grounded in three thousand years’ thrice sovereign physical Jewish presence. That claim is recognized in the post-Ottoman Empire League of Nations Palestine Mandate accepted by its successor UN. The Mandate, originally applying to both western and eastern Palestine, recognized the historic Jewish connection to Palestine and called for establishment there of the Jewish national home, but contained a proviso allowing excluding from it of the 78% of Palestine east of the Jordan River, today’s Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan. There was no such proviso for excluding area west of the River.
Israel today is under enormous international pressure to agree to establishment inside the land of Israel, western Palestine, of a new Arab state (in addition to the Palestinian Arab-majority state sitting already on 78% of Palestine). Establishing a western Palestine Arab state in part of the Jewish national home would be an international renege of the Palestine Mandate. The UN and EU are in favor of this, as is the United States, as stated this very month by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in her address to, of all forums, the Israeli Knesset. That “two-state solution,” per UNSC 2334, would be along the 1949 ceasefire lines (i.e., excluding from Israel both Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem – Old City with its Temple Mount, Western Wall, Jewish Quarter, etc., City of David, and all).
Under that UNSCR 2334 “two-state solution,” Israel would be thrown back to the perilous 9-miles wide in the lowland middle long eastern boundary snaking through the heart of the land and bifurcating Jerusalem and looming over its narrow access corridor from the coast, no longer the clean defensible security border Rabin in his last speech intended of the Jordan River backed by the ascending Judea-Samaria hill country ridge. Israelis remember the extent to which the “international community” stood by it the last time an Israel confined to such narrow vulnerable boundaries was threatened with extinction by massed enemy armies peering over it from all sides: the United Nations abruptly folded its tents and silently stole away into the night.
Awakening More American Jews to the Seminal Significance of the Jewish Event in Our Time
American Jews, I believe, fall into three groups regarding “two-states.” There are those who, like me, join most Israelis in strongly opposing it. There are those, including some faithful readers of these weekly epistles, who strongly favor it, and there are those who haven’t thought deeply about it and/or have perhaps changeable views on it. It is first to the first and then to the third of these groups that I address the rest of this week’s email.
Charles Krauthammer was right when he worried in a Washington Post op-ed (3/14/16 in the Philadelphia Inquirer – Krauthammer: Identity and the Holocaust) that American Jews inadequately appreciate the monumental Jewish event of the “miraculous age” that’s our time: “the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty,” and all that entails – “the revival of Hebrew (a cultural resurrection unique human history), the flowering of a unique Hebraic culture radiating throughout the Jewish world.” And I would add to that the fulfillment of a Dream of Generations, as Ben-Gurion put it, drempt by generations of our people in Europe, for whom the Holocaust was a culmination of abominable persecution, not an anomaly, and in Muslim lands, where they’d been persecuted dhimmis for generations.
We have a weapon, alas a secret one, that can get through to more American Jews the immensity of homeland Jewish sovereignty’s rebirth in our own time and awaken, hopefully, a stronger sense of involvement in it. I refer to vividly captured, incredibly moving first-person accounts of participants in our homeland’s sovereign rebirth and preservation, and in the bringing home to it of persecuted Exiles from East and West.
When I suggested last week I was pondering appending my hopes for these books to these weekly emails, the comment I got was “In the year 5782, the Jewish People doesn’t need another book club.” Ah, but this one is different. Books don’t get recommended here unless they’re grippingly readable first-person accounts of our Jewish homeland’s sovereign rebirth and preservation, Ingathering of the Exiles, etc. An exceptionally moving chapter in this is that of the Aliyah Bet, Holocaust survivors’ escape from the cursed continent of Europe against the strongly asserted will of the British, and their sailing home in rickety ships into the teeth of the anti-Jewish British blockade. Here’s my take on books on it.
Books on the Aliyah Bet
The centerpiece of this heroic undertaking by Palestinian Jewish seamen, American WWII vet volunteers and, not least, Hitler’s Holocaust’s survivors themselves who trekked over mountains in winter to reach those rickety ships, was, of course, the saga of the Exodus, subject of many books, of which I’ve read a half-dozen.
Of these, by me the most moving are acclaimed Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk’s bio of the ship’s commander, Yossi Harel, Commander of the Exodus, Nissan Degani’s Exodus Calling, and Gordon Thomas’ Operation Exodus. All three grippingly capture participants’, sailors’ and survivors’, experiences and seering emotions – riveting reading. Ruth Gruber’s Destination Palestine movingly takes up the tale of the passengers’ travail at Haifa, following them through the return to Port de Bouc and then to, unthinkably, Hamburg. Well worth the read. David Holly’s Exodus 1947 is a beautifully written history of the ship, capturing the mood of its days as a Chesapeake Bay steamer, its WWII service with the British and American navies, and then its career as Aliyah Bet flagship. A good read. Rev. Grauel’s Grauel is an auto-bio of the wonderful Christian preacher who sailed on the Exodus, gave real-time radio accounts of the passengers’ heroic resistance of the Royal Navy’s high seas boarding, and then, on shore, gave immensely important first-person accounts to the UN and the media.
On other ships of the Aliyah Bet, a great adventure tale is Arie Eliav’s The Voyage of the Ulua, of which he was captain. A couple scenes are unforgettable. One occurs in the port of Copenhagen, where the British have put strong pressure on the Danes to prevent the ship, which hadn’t yet picked up passengers, from leaving. The port Commandant comes aboard and does an inspection, asking Eliav, masquerading as “ship’s administrative officer van Groot,” what’s the purpose of all these numbered shelves in the hold. He says that the ship is heading to the Arctic to study the base of the fish food chain, and the shelves will hold little aquariums. “All right,” says the Commandant, “scientific expedition, free to go. But [under his breath] I want to ask you one question: How much are the Jews of New York paying for this fishing expedition?” The second such scene comes in Italy, where the Ulua (which became the Haganah ship Chaim Arlosoroff) loads mostly young women refugees in addition to the mostly young women refugees whom it had boarded in Sweden. One of the “Italian” girls is the sister of one of the “Swedes,” both having believed till then she’d been their family’s sole survivor. And the captain finds his future wife among the passengers. Can you top this?
Another excellent Aliyah Bet book is Captain Rudy Patzert’s Running the Palestine Blockade. Murray Greenfield and Joseph Hochstein’s The Jews’ Secret Fleet; The Untold Story of North American Volunteers who Smashed the British Blockade of Palestine, movingly captures the stories of the Aliyah Bet’s principal ships, highlighting American volunteers’ (of which Greenfield was one) role on them.
Inspiring first-person accounts of participants in other aspects of modern Israel’s incredible story, including in the wars and rescuing Yemenite and Ethiopian Jewish refugees, have fallen into my bookshelves, and I hope to get to them, but all-in-all, those of the Aliyah Bet have touched me the deepest. Perhaps they might nudge some sleepers awake.