WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: In these weekly emails, I’ve railed against the Reform and Conservatives’ et al letter to the U.S. President calling for “two-states” with borders that “hew precisely” to “the 1967 borders” and against Israeli “annexation” in “the West Bank.” But the shanda is not just how they said it, but the substance of what they said.
A Deeper Look at a Disturbing Document – U.S. Reform and Conservatives’ Call for “Two-States” with Borders “Hewing Precisely” to “1967 Borders”
You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly know I’m obsessed with we ourselves, American Jews, mouthing pejoratives designed by their coiners to delegitimize our Jewish people’s homeland of Israel – Palestine west of the Jordan River, including historic Jerusalem and defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland.
High among these delegitimizing canards are
*** miscalling the Israel-Jordan exclusively military ceasefire lines of 1949 (which left invader Jordan holding historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, leaving Israel nine miles wide in its lowland middle), declared in their defining document to be ceasefire lines only without prejudice to either side’s border claims, as “Israel’s 1967 borders,” with any eventual border differences therefrom constituting “territorial adjustments” thereto; and
*** misnaming what had been known by their Hebrew-origin names Judea and Samaria for three thousand years, including by the U.N. in 1947, as 1950-coined “the West Bank,” with Israeli application of Israeli law thereto constituting “annexation,” defined by Encarta Dictionary (alt-T-L-T in Microsoft Word) as “to take over territory and incorporate it into another [emphasis added] political entity, e.g., a country or state.”
These bold-faced-above Dirty Words, all of them, appeared in an open letter sent in 2019 to then-President Trump by a shockingly broad group of major American Jewish organizations and institutions, including by me most shockingly the Reform Movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis and Union for Reform Judaism, and the Conservative Movement’s United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Rabbinical Assembly and Zionist affiliate Mercaz. That letter called on the American President
“… to clearly express your opposition to unilateral measures outside of this framework [i.e., “a negotiated two-state solution”], including annexation by Israel of any territory in the West Bank.” [emphasis added]
And added that
“… While that [two-state] solution is unlikely to hew precisely to the 1967 borders, any territorial adjustments must result in a signed agreement between the two sides.” [emphasis added]
At the time of that letter and thereafter what I have railed against in these weekly emails is our own community’s lay and religious leadership cravenly mouthing these historically and legally inaccurate put-downs of our people’s homeland claim.
Truth to tell, I am not over that yet, but we need to take a Deeper Look at what that letter to the American President by these American Jewish community leaders sought.
Even if the Reform and Conservative movements’ et al letter writers to President Trump had called the 1949 ceasefire lines “the 1949 ceasefire lines” and not Israel’s “1967 borders,” and Judea-Samaria “Judea-Samaria” and not “the West Bank,” and had acknowledged that Israel has bona fide historical and legal (San Remo, Palestine Mandate) claim to western Palestine, the land of Israel, beyond the 1949 ceasefire lines, so that applying Israeli law there would not be “annexation” of another political entity’s lands, still these letter writers’ call for a “two-state solution” with borders that except as otherwise agreed would “hew precisely” to those 1949 lines would leave Israel irretrievably Jewishly incomplete and militarily indefensible.
There is an intermediate position between a “two-state solution,” to which some of you Gentle Readers hereof are wedded, and my and others’ view of Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan, sitting on 78% of the Palestine Mandate, as already sovereign Arab Palestine, alongside the 22% west of the River, the land of Israel, as Jewish Palestine. One version, PM Rabin’s plan, in a Knesset speech a month before he was killed, was summarized in a Caroline Glick-carried Breitbart interview of retired Gen. Gershon Hacohen, Without Judea and Samaria, Israel Cannot Defend Tel Aviv (1/24/19). I would of course have you “Two-State Solution” believers see things my way, but short of that here’s Gen. Rabin’s less-than-Two-States plan, based on four principles.
Rabin’s first principle was that Israel must remain a Jewish state with a large Jewish majority. “By extending Palestinian self-rule to the Palestinian population centers in Judea and Samaria in January 1996, the [interim agreement] deal placed more than 90 percent of Palestinians under Palestinian governance.” Gen. Hacohen in 2019: “Israel ended the occupation in 1996. It does not control the lives or the governance of the Palestinians. The Palestinians control their own lives and their own governance.” [I object, of course, to “occupation” having existed ever, and to calling Palestinian Arabs “the Palestinians.” During the Mandate, the world recognized Palestinian Jews as “Palestinian” too. Indeed, the UN’s 1947 Palestine partition resolution called the land’s Arabs and its Jews “the two Palestinian peoples.”]
Rabin’s second principle was that Jerusalem, expanded to include, e.g., Givat Zeev and Maale Adumim, “must remain united under sole Israeli sovereignty.” Rabin’s third premise, Gen. Hacohen explained, was that “Israel needs to control the Jordan Valley – broadly construed – in perpetuity,” in which Rabin included “all the land along Israel’s eastern frontier with Jordan, and stretches to include the eastern settlement band along the Samaritan mountain ridge in the north, and the Judean hills in the south.” Fourth, “Rabin said that the Palestinian entity that would be formed in a final peace deal would be less than a state,” excluding control of the electronic spectrum and airspace, and “wouldn’t have an army.”
There is an historical precedent for this, all right, a long time ago, three thousand years ago, more or less. The Israelites’ northern kingdom of Israel had a large Canaanite population, with its own internal governmental apparatus functioning under the Israelite monarchy. (See Finkelstein & Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (p. 192), discussed in Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, pp. 34-35).
Back on 10/13/19, in BSMW #977, I discussed the consequences to Israel and Jews of Israeli acquiescence in a western Palestine (i.e., inside the land of Israel) “two-state solution.” I said:
One definitively sufficient reason Israel and supporters of the Jewish homeland simply cannot agree to this is, as Dr, Martin Sherman put it this week in “Into the Fray: Alternative Jordans,” JPost, 10/7/19,
“… the crucial strategic importance for Israel of the highlands of Judea-Samaria and the Jordan Valley. As I have been at pains to point out on numerous occasions, not only are these highlands the only topographical barrier between Jordan and the heavily populated coastal plain, but any forces – regular or renegade – deployed on them will have complete topographical command and control of virtually all Israel’s airfields (military and civilian, including Ben Gurion, the only international airport), its major ports and naval bases, its principal traffic axes (rail and road), vital infrastructure installations/systems (electrical power, desalination plants and water conveyance), centers of civilian government and military command and 80% of the civilian population and commercial activity.”
Read about the desperate three battles of Latrun, all of them lost, in the 1948 war, and about the battles of Ammunition Hill and for the steep slopes dominating access to Jerusalem in the 1967 war, Israeli control of the skies and all, and ask yourself how can the Reform and Conservative movements of American Jews call for an inside-the-land-of-Israel western Palestine Arab state with borders that “hew precisely” to the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines that would bestow those very “highlands of Judea-Samaria and the Jordan Valley” into that new Arab state’s hands.
But beyond these key American Jewish groups bestowing their heksher on a security-wise suicidal “two-state solution” so beloved by the UN and EU, they’re bestowing their blessing as well on undoing the once-in-two-thousand-years (am I exaggerating?) Jewish peoplehood achievement, through the 1948 and 1967 wars, that occurred in our time, literally on the heels of a Holocaust – rebirth of sovereign independence of our historic Jewish homeland of Israel. What would be left of that homeland sovereign state, if that much of it survived, after such a “two-state solution” would be a nine-miles-wide in the most populated lowland middle coastal strip rump of a homeland state, sans historic Jerusalem – which Bibi, love him or not, correctly called the core of the core of that homeland.
So where do we come out in a situation in which a “two-state solution” of a western Palestine Arab state, in Israelis’ considered opinion, is incompatible with a viable Jewish homeland state of the Jews? We Jews in the West have to make the case in the West that the Palestine Mandate’s 78%-22% division into what have become the states of Jordan and Israel constitutes an at least equitable to Arabs two-state division of Palestine between Arabs and Jews.
I haven’t changed my mind since #977 that a more-than-equitable-to-Arabs division of Palestine between Arabs and Jews – Jordan and Israel – already exists. But if you won’t buy that, Gentle Reader, I offer you PM Gen. Rabin’s four principle plan – Israel remaining as a Jewish state, with sovereignty over undivided Jerusalem (Temple Mount and all) and over defensible Judea-Samaria, with Judea-Samaria-resident Palestinian Arabs having internal autonomy but less than a western Palestine, inside-the-land-of-Israel, sovereign state.