WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Biblical interpretation isn’t my shtick, but here goes. The Promised Land didn’t come with free rent for eternity. Every generation has responsibilities, with our lease renewed each spring at our Passover Seders. Today’s American Jews have to resist “two states along the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps,” which gives the Jewish people ZERO homeland equity in defensible Judea-Samaria and core of the core of our homeland historic Jerusalem – Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David, etc.
Dems’ “Two States Along the 1967 Lines with Agreed Land Swaps” Gives Jews ZERO Equity in Judea-Samaria and Old Jerusalem and Must Be Resisted
I don’t know what troubling scene from the Bible comes back to bother your dreams. Of all the biblical images I learned in my beginning religious school years, the one that kept coming back to unsettle my mind through my milestone and thence increasingly millstone birthdays was that of the prophet Moses on the day of his death, standing on a mountain in Moab, gazing at the Promised Land afar off. It didn’t seem to me just. Of all our generations of Jews, spanning millennia, no one deserved more to enter that Land than Moses, leader of our people through all tribulations out of the land of Egypt, to Sinai, through the desert for decades, to the Land’s very threshold.
It took two consummate saga-spinners of our own time, Tolkien and Rowling, by me silently using Moses as model, to get through to me what’s become my own view of what the Almighty meant by leaving Moses in Moab. It was Gandalf who devised and drove the desperate quest to cast the One Ring, recovery of which would have given The Enemy invincible power, irrecoverably into the Cracks of Doom deep in The Enemy’s own land of Mordor. But Gandalf couldn’t accompany Frodo and Sam into the Enemy’s land. The two Hobbits had to brave the grave dangers they faced and faced down there on their own. And Dumbledore couldn’t stand beside Harry Potter in that final confrontation with Voldemort in the Great Hall. Harry had to face down the evil foe on his own.
But what’s all that got to do with us, Jews here in America, over three millennia and half-a-world away from Moses on Nebo? The Promise, for those who believe in these things, and Jewish history for those who are ambivalent or just don’t, has been for us a continuous opportunity to prove ourselves worthy, not a free ride for eternity. Each of our generations, starting with Joshua’s and continuing into our own day, had to do what could be done, first to secure the homeland, and then to live in a way, centered there, that’s for ourselves but not for ourselves only. When Israel and Judah lived in the way the prophets denounced, they fell. The Maccabee-founded kingdom Judaea foundered and fell in less than a century, but a little bit longer than reborn Israel has lived until now.
And now it’s our time’s turn. Astounding events have occurred during our lives. The Dream of Generations, as Ben-Gurion called it, sovereign restoration of our homeland after eighteen hundred years of unending persecution of our adrift people in Christian and Muslim lands, has been fulfilled by a homeland army of homeland Jews in 1948-49 and 1967.
Barely alive survivors of the culmination of European mistreatment staggered out of death camps and drove themselves through snows in winter, against the will of the British, to Aliyah Bet ships and into the teeth of the anti-Jewish Palestine British blockade.
Beginning while Israel’s touch-and-go War of Independence was still being fought, thousands, ultimately some fifty thousand, centuries-long persecuted Yemenite Jews, as authentically close to biblical Jews as any on earth, walked most of the way to Aden to fly “as on eagles’ wings” in a “Magic Carpet” airlift back to the homeland, where they too found welcome. And then Operations Moses and Solomon brought home black Ethiopian Jews.
Few countries in the world, and not just pound-for-pound, have contributed to relieving humanitarian catastrophies all over the world to the extent Israel has.
Next month Jews in Israel, America and everyplace else where they live will gather in intimate family groups to commemorate for the three-thousand-something annual time that trek led by Moses from Egypt to Moab and thence by Joshua into the Land where we have continuously dwelt as homeland-claiming indigenous people for three thousand years. [That’s true, I wrote a book on it, and ask historian Parkes, who wrote that the continuous tenacious homeland presence of Jews, in spite of every discouragement (believe me, an understatement), wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”]
Alas, there are Jews in America today who would use the Passover Seder, that annual renewal of our peoplehood and homeland connection, to have you believe not just that defensible Judea-Samaria and Temple Mount-Western Wall-etc. historic Jerusalem are “occupied territory” of “Palestinians” who’ve never ruled any of it, but even that the very restoration of our homeland’s independence in 1948 itself was a crime against Arabs.
Here, e.g., is J Street’s Passover haggadah, which I downloaded at its website’s invitation two years ago. Among other less than self-respecting parodies of the Seder’s time-honored passages, here’s what appears there among the Ten Plagues:
“As a Jew, as someone connected to Israel, how do I reckon with the terrible price paid by the Palestinian people for the creation of the Jewish state?” [emphasis added]
But J Street, you say, is extreme. Agreed. But pause and ponder for a moment over the seemingly less-than-extreme “consensus policy” of the U.S. Democratic Party, of which the vast majority of American Jews today are members. A 5/18/20 Times of Israel article quoted former U.S, Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro as putting it this way:
“Support for a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps remains a consensus policy within the Democratic Party ….”
Ok, I’m to the right of many of you who honor me by reading these weekly epistles, but I say to you, even if it raises your hackles, that this Democratic Party consensus policy is Very Extreme. It gives the Jewish people Zero homeland equity in every inch over the 1949 Israel-Jordan exclusively military ceasefire lines, expressly declared in their defining document to be without prejudice to both sides’ border claims. Every inch Israel wants over those lines has to be “swapped” for.
On “the Palestinian” (nee Jordanian) side of that not-border ceasefire line sit historic Jerusalem – Old City with its Temple Mount and Western Wall, City of David, untold Jewish archeological treasures and all – and, you don’t have to take Col. Kemp’s word for it, just look at Mark Langfan’s topographical map, the sole defensible long eastern border Judea-Samaria hill country heartland.
That U.S. Democratic Party “consensus policy” of “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps” is poison for the Jewish homeland of Israel. And it flies in the face of the Palestine Mandate with its Jewish national home with an escape clause only for Jewless Jordan east of the River. It even defies 242, which didn’t demand complete withdrawal from “the” territories.
This Seder night, my Jewish American friends of the Democratic Party persuasion, remain at the table a few minutes longer while echoes of “Next Year in Jerusalem” remain in the air. Drink a fifth cup with a vow to contest in your party’s own councils the “consensus policy” of “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps.” (All right, I’d have you toast that fifth cup to your fellow Jews in Israel’s rejection of an inside-the-land-of-Israel western Palestine Arab state, alongside the Jew-free existing Palestinian Arab-majority eastern Palestine state, altogether.)
“Magic Carpet” Books
An astonishing consortium of entities with disparate interests – newly independent Israel, Arabs, by happenstance an Alaska airline, even cooperatively the British – combined, starting while the Arab-Jewish Palestine war of 1948-49 was still going on, to bring home from Yemen to their forefathers’ homeland “a mass of people belonging for all practical purposes to the Bible age.”
Two accounts of this remarkable saga that ultimately brought home close to fifty thousand Yemenite Jews in perhaps the world’s largest airlift home of a people are Shlomo Barer’s The Magic Carpet, giving a comprehensive view of the project, and Captain Elgen M. Long’s On Eagles’ Wings, An Untold Story of The Magic Carpet, an Alaska Airline navigator’s view of the effort. I commend them both to you both as illuminating reading and as inspirational insights into what both the Yemenite Jews and Land of Israel are all about.