WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A most disturbing poll of Israeli Arabs reported this week that only a quarter would support Israel in an existential-for-it war with Arab states. In 1947, Bevin had observed that for Arabs the essential point of principle was to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, period. So that hasn’t changed. What we must do now is not naively offer up our homeland’s heart and high-ground in vain hope it will buy us acceptance in a remnant of Palestine, but make the historically and legally valid and excruciatingly needed case that the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, is our people’s Jewish national home.
If Not There, Where, and If Not Now, When?
Hillel, forgive me. I just borrowed your timeless challenge for my weekly need this week to argue for the eleven hundred and twelfth time to my mostly unAwake if not unWoke fellow American Jews that there’s only one effective response to incessant cries that our Jewish homeland has no right to historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all) and defensible Judea-Samaria, or even to exist as such, period – “Yes, it does!” (And with that, Palestinian Arabs are still the majority in 78% of the Palestine Mandate, Jordan.)
This week’s delegitimizings include an especially disturbing one by Arabs among whom Israel’s Jews (a plurality of whom are of uninterrupted Middle East heritage themselves) live – not far-away Arabs in North Africa and Arabian peninsula, or even in neighboring Arab states, or even in western Palestine over the “green line” (“the West Bank” and Gaza), but inside the “green line” – Arab citizens of Israel itself.
An Israel Hayom article Wednesday, Poll: 75% of Arab Citizens Believe Jews Have No Right to Sovereignty in Israel (5/11/22), says the poll found:
“When asked where their loyalties would lie in case of an existential battle between Israel and Arab states, 26% of Arab Israelis said they would support the Jewish state, 23% said they would back Israel’s enemies and 51% said they would remain neutral.” [emphasis added]
That same day, Wednesday this week, 1948-67 invader [nee Trans-]Jordan jumped in with both feet – asserting its own role in historic Jerusalem and asserting Israel has none. A World Israel News article this week, 5/11/22, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi Said Israel has No Sovereignty Over the Temple Mount, Countering the Israeli PM’s Remarks, led:
“Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi slammed Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s denial that the Hashemite Kingdom holds sway over Temple Mount security and policy.
“’Israel has no sovereignty over the holy places in Jerusalem. This is occupied Palestinian land. Israel is an occupying force that is blocking moves taken by the Jordanian Ministry of Endowments in order to maintain security and peace in Al-Aqsa,’ Safadi told Jordanian media.
“’Our message is one: Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine, a sovereign state that must be established within the 1967 borders,’ he said. ‘This is the only way to achieve lasting peace.’” [emphasis added]
The United States chimed in. This World Israel News article referenced a phone call Monday between the Jordanian king and President Biden, a statement of which, the WIN article says, “used the Islamic name for the Temple Mount, Haram al-Sharif, as opposed to the name used by much of the Western world,” and made “no mention of the extensive Jewish historical and religious ties to the site nor that the current status quo prohibits Jews from praying there.”
The Geller Report had an article this week (5/12/22), Calls for Eliminating Israel in Herald Square NYC on ‘Al Quds Day’ 2022, featuring photos and quotes “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free … Free the Great Al-Aqsa Mosque, Free Palestine … The Palestine Right To Return Coalition …Judaism Yes, Zionism No, The State of Israel Must Go.”
But focus on the meaning of that poll of Israel’s Arab citizens, a mere quarter of whom would support Israel in an existential-for-it war with Arab states. It tells us crystal clearly that how British Foreign Secretary Bevin [no friend of ours] summed up respective Jewish and Arab Palestine aspirations back in 1947 remains still true today. Bevin:
“There are in Palestine about 1,200,000 Arabs and 600,000 Jews. For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.” (Great Britain, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, vol. 433, col. 988, quoted in Bell, Terror Out of Zion, New York, St. Martin’s Oress, 1977, p. 188, emphasis added)
(There were probably fewer Arabs there then than 1.2 million, more like only “approximately one million” – see, e.g., Katz, Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, Updated Steimatzky pb ed, p.23.) But the question for us is how to respond to this three-quarters-of-a-century-continued “resistance to the last” rejection of “the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine” by even Arabs who have become citizens of our Jewish state.
Let’s start with two ways it seems to me not to respond.
[1] It seems to me naïve to suppose that offering Arabs, most directly Israel’s own Arab citizens, a compromise “two-state solution,” even sacrificing most-Jewishly meaningful historic Jerusalem and most-Jewishly defensible Judea-Samaria (see, e.g., U.S, Reform and Conservatives’ two-states with borders “hewing precisely” to “the 1967 borders”), leaving Jews just a minor rump of the original Palestine Mandate, will bring peace between Arabs and Jews.
[2] It seems to me even worse – self-disrespectfully shutting our eyes to our people’s two-millennia historically and legally valid dream of generations for our homeland’s sovereign redemption – to join J Street’s apologetic insertion among the Ten Plagues in its Hagaddah (p. 8): “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?”
We don’t have to ask the Kurds or Yazidis what it’s like for a minority people to have no homeland of it own. We know, for longer and in more places more excruciatingly painfully than anyone else. Over the centuries in good old Christian Europe, every device of ethnic cleansing – Pale of Settlement, ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, pogrom – was devised with express reference to us. And we lived for centuries as permanently persecuted dhimmis in Muslim lands.
If you’re in doubt about this, and about the courageous [no other word] actions of Palestinian Jews in our own time to bring to our homeland from Europe and Muslim countries Holocaust survivors and other persecuted Jews, I’d have you read gripping books that I’ve read. E.g., on the Aliyah Bet, Yoram Kaniuk’s Commander of the Exodus, Gordon Thomas’ Operation Exodus, Nissan Degani’s Exodus Calling, and those on the rescue of Yemenite, Ethiopian and other Muslim lands’ Jews. These moving books and others give glimpses, often in these peoples’ own words, of the depth of their maltreatment, the West’s utter indifference, their unstoppable drive to get to their homeland, and the courageous aid by homeland Jews and American volunteers.
And for us, not just an anywhere homeland. In my book’s, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine’s, preface, I wrote: “The Jewish people’s sense of homeland is place-specific, Israel-specific. It would not play in Uganda.” My book, footnoting (I was Ivy League Law Review-trained in citing authorities) 600-plus times archeologists and historians listed in Authorities Cited, I traced Jewish homeland physical presence from the Late Bronze-Iron I Age transition (c. 1200 BCE) to our time’s Zionist movement. British historian Parkes asserted that presence wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”
In, e.g., a fortnight ago’s #1110, “Yom San Remo: An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” I summarized Steve Feldman’s JNS article’s statement of the case that the San Remo Treaty and Palestine Mandate gave international treaty recognition to the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, as our Jewish people’s national home.
The land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan River, historic Jerusalem, Judea-Samaria and all, is historically and legally our Jewish people’s national home. No people has needed or earned its homeland more. Both Israelis and Diaspora Jews must unapologetically make this case. And if not now, when?