#1113 5/22/22 – “So Let’s Talk About the ‘Nakba’ and ‘Responsibility for Palestinian Suffering’”?  Not Framed in that One-Sided Way 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Tlaib et ilk have introduced HR 1123, “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian Refugee Rights.”  Tobin says Congress should eagerly debate it.  But “he who frames the debate, wins the debate.”  So instead let’s fight this attack on Israel’s very legitimacy by stating in clear simple terms our homeland’s international treaty-recognized three-millennia historical roots.    

“So Let’s Talk About the ‘Nakba’ and ‘Responsibility for Palestinian Suffering’”?  Not Framed in that One-Sided Way

“He who frames the debate, wins the debate,” a Philadelphia Inquirer editor, Chris Satullo, observed in an Inq op-ed on 1/21/06.  I remember it a decade and a half later, not because the context in which he said it had anything to do with us Jews, which it didn’t, but as having been – zounds! – an utterance mouthed by one of my hometown paper’s people with which I agreed.

A looming instance of the advantage of framing the debate arose this week, in “the Squad’s” introduction in the U.S, Congress of House Resolution 1123, “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian Refugee Rights.”  Jonathan Tobin wrote a JNS article Friday on it, Let’s Talk About the ‘Nakba’ and Who’s Really Responsible for Palestinian Suffering, calling Rep. Tlaib et ilk’s resolution one of those rare ones that “demands attention.”

Jonathan rightly summarizes the real 1948 history – Arab rejection of a Jewish state altogether,  the Palestinian Arabs’ involvement in the Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction, the displacement from vast Arab lands of more mostly Israel-absorbed indigenous Middle-Eastern Jews than Arabs left tiny Israel, resulting in Israel being majority “non-White” today, etc.  He concludes:  “So rather than ignore Tlaib and the Progressive Democrats’ willingness to mainstream anti-Semitism, mainstream Democrats and Republicans should eagerly take up the chance to debate this resolution” as “an opportunity for centrist Democrats to demonstrate their rejection of the intersectional myths that a considerable portion of their base has embraced.”

But go back and read again how this U.S. Congressional resolution’s framers titled their resolution:  “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian Refugee Rights.”  Palestinian Arabs’ real “Nakba” wasn’t that Israel was “created” in 1948, but that Israel’s homeland army of homeland Jews (not bad for a state that a day before the invasion had just been “created” and “founded”) threw back and then some the instantly invading Arabs’ attempt to destroy it.  And, btw, there were more Middle-eastern Jewish than Arab refugees, as Tobin pointed out.  So just “the Nakba” and “Palestinian Refugee Rights” shouldn’t be the debate frame.

It’s what Tobin also says, but doesn’t pursue in this article, that’s how the debate should be framed:

“The story of Israel is one that stands on its own and is widely accepted by the overwhelming majority of Americans.  It is the one Jewish state on the planet and represents the 2,000-year-old dream of Jews for a return to their ancient homeland.” (emphasis added)

The story of Israel indeed stands on its own, but represents vastly more than a 2,000-year-old-dream of return.  Historian Parkes made the case (see also Verlin, Israel 3,000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3,000 Year Presence in Palestine) that Jews’ continuous homeland-claiming presence all through the successive (mostly non-Arab) foreign rule post-biblical centuries, which Parkes understated as “in spite of every discouragement,” wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”   Western Palestine’s, the land of Israel’s, 1948 population was about a million Arabs and 600,000 Jews, and there would have been vastly more Jews but for the successive post-biblical slaughters of homeland Jews by Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Mongols, Muslims and others, medieval European decrees against “transport of Jews to the East,” Turkish eviction of Jews in World War I and the before-during-and-even-after-the-Holocaust anti-Jewish British blockade against Jews escaping from Europe back home.  And on the international treaty side, there are the San Remo treaty and Palestine Mandate recognizing Jews’ historical connection and calling for restoration of their Jewish national home with a “withholding” clause applicable only to Palestine east of the River (today’s Palestinian Arab-majority judenrein Jordan).

Very little of any of this is known to that considerable portion of the Democrats’ base that Tobin says has embraced “intersectional myths,” or even to unWoke Americans.

Tobin says in this JNS article that “the pro-Israel community has generally ignored the Palestinian narrative about 1948.”  But, worse, it seems to me, we have failed to get across to Western publics a clear easily-grasped history countering incessantly hammered “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian Refugee Rights.”  Offering, as most American Jews today, by me naively, do, a “Two-State Solution” surrendering the key parts of the land of Israel liberated in 1967 does not satisfy our adversaries’ insatiable hunger for the parts – bemoaned as “the Nakba” and unfilled “Palestinian Refugee Rights” – liberated in 1948.

The effective answer seems to me this:  for three thousand years, the land of Israel, none of which “the Palestinians” have ever ruled ever (and foreign Arabs only between 638 and 1099), is the Jewish homeland, comprising a natural boundary defensible, Jewishly meaningful 22% of Palestine, the remaining 78% of which is Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan.

Western publics incessantly fed “the Nakba” and “Palestinian refugees” (as though there were no Middle-eastern Jewish ones), Israel “apartheid” (and it isn’t even majority “White”), etc., can understand this counter-case, and may start to believe it if we ourselves – Diaspora Jews and Israelis – stop calling Palestinian Arabs “The Palestinians” (when as recently as the Mandate “The Palestinians” was us), historic Jerusalem “traditionally Arab [remember that?] East” Jerusalem (3 times Jewish state capital, Jewish majority since 1800’s Turkish rule), Judea-Samaria (in use for 3,000 years, including by the UN in 1947) “the West Bank,” our presence over the 1949-67 ceasefire lines “Jewish settlers” in “occupied Palestinian territory,” etc., etc.

This seems to me better than that “mainstream Democrats and Republicans,” instead of ignoring it [Tobin calls such resolutions “almost always not worth noticing”], “should eagerly take up the chance to debate this resolution” framed by its framers as “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian Refugee Rights.”