WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Jonathan Tobin had a timely article this week analyzing a new Pew survey which found that support for Israel among young Americans is well below that of their elders. He says what Israel must do. I don’t quarrel with that, but I think that on the front lines in getting the validity and justice of our Jewish people’s land of Israel homeland across to Americans are us American Jews. I list ten facts in support thereof that I believe are largely unknown to Americans.
This Week: What the Pew Survey Found and What WE Must Do About It
Jonathan Tobin had a timely JNS column Friday, analyzing the findings of a new Pew survey of Americans’ rachmones, respectively, for Israelis and Palestinian Arabs – Who’s To Blame for Young American and Democrat Coolness Toward Israel, JNS, 5/27/22. He says what Israel must do, but the burden’s not on Israel alone.
Here’s how Tobin sums up where things stand and where they’re ominously headed, and then poses the relevant questions:
“Those Americans who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust and Israel’s existential battles for survival in 1948, 1967 and 1973 are likely to sympathize with the Jewish state. Those who came of age in the last 40 years – when Israel has increasingly been falsely depicted as an oppressor of an ‘indigenous people; or even as an ‘apartheid state’ – are more likely to think ill of it and view Palestinians as deserving of sympathy. [emphasis added]
“There are two questions to be asked about this. Why did it happen and what, if anything, is to be done about it?”
I agree with Tobin on not blaming for this diminishing American support for our people’s homeland either Netanyahu or Trump and George Bush and George Washington. He writes:
“If you view Israelis and Jews as possessors of ‘white privilege’ – though the majority of Israelis are people of color who trace their origins to former homes in the Middle East and North Africa – and think of Palestinian Arabs, rather than Jews as the indigenous people in the country, then you are likely to ignore the facts of the conflict or about the character of the movements that lead the Palestinians.” [emphasis added]
It’s on the second question – what’s to be done? – on which I find Jonathan’s answer not incorrect but incomplete. I agree the solution’s not endless Israeli concessions. “Each concession only strengthened the false narrative that Israel was a thief returning stolen property to the rightful owners ….” Rather, he continues,
“what Israel needs is a more aggressive information policy grounded in arguments for Jewish rights and the truth about the nature of its opponents, not anodyne sentiments about a desire of peace or even attempts to distract the public from the conflict by talking about Israel’s beauty or the value of its high-tech industry.”
Tobin concludes that “Israel will never convince ‘progressives’ that believe it has no right to exist” that it does, but “instead, it must battle for those in the middle, pointing out that the toxic theories of the left are a permission slip for anti-Semitism and not advocacy for human rights,” that “any other approach will only ensure that the troubling trends among young people and Democrats will continue to get worse.”
I don’t disagree with what Tobin says here, but by me it’s incomplete. We’re talking here about Americans’ view as to who constitute, quoting Tobin, “the indigenous people in the country.” So who’s on the front lines to make the case to Americans that it’s not Arabs but Jews – Israel or us American Jews? Us, but we’re not.
Here are things we can and must proclaim, and be adamant about it. Mostly, this consists of making known to Americans facts about Israel the American people (including many American Jews) by and large don’t know, and which the American media are less than likely to tell them. Here are ten such largely unknown to Americans Israel facts.
First, Palestinian Arabs are not “THE Palestinians.” The names “Palestine” and “Palestinian” are not Dirty Words, but neutral descriptive terms of a place and its peoples that have been hijacked by Palestinian Arabs. During the Mandate, everyone living there was “Palestinian,” as even the AP has acknowledged. Indeed, Jews more than Arabs referred to themselves as such – the Palestine Post (today’s Jerusalem Post) and a host of other Jewish institutions, the American League for a Free Palestine, etc. The UN itself in its 1947 Palestine Partition resolution referenced Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples.”
Second, Jews are more indigenous to the land of Israel than are Arabs, Palestinian Arabs claim to be ever-present descendants of the Canaanites of the second millennium BCE. So where were they when Israelites and then Jews took on Assyrians, Babylonians, Alexander’s Seleucid successors and finally Rome, all of which in their annals identified their opponents as Jews? Arab invaders defeated the ruling European Byzantines in 638 CE and ruled, under increasing Turkish control, until the European Crusader conquest in 1099. Turks defeated Crusaders in 1187 and succeeding rulers, from when the dust settled into the twentieth century, were non-Arab Mamluks and Turks.
Third, the Romans did not exile the Jews, who remained in the land, initially still the majority, and clung in homeland-claiming presence all through the centuries. Historian Parkes wrote that Jews’ continuous presence, “in spite of every discouragement,” wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”
Fourth, Palestinian Arabs have never ruled Palestine ever. Every ruler between final Roman destruction of Jewish Judaea in 135 CE and Israel’s sovereign rebirth in 1948 as the land of Israel’s next native state was a foreign invader, and mostly non-Arab at that.
Fifth, the Palestine Mandate recognized western Palestine, the land of Israel, as the Jewish national home. The UN-adopted League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate recognized the Jewish people’s historic connection with Palestine and provided for re-establishment there of the Jewish national home. There was a clause in that Mandate allowing the Mandate’s trustee, Britain, to withhold its application to Palestine east of the River, which Britain gleefully did creating today’s Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan on 78% of Palestine’s land, but there was no such withholding clause for Palestine west of the River, the historic land of Israel itself.
Sixth, there were close to as many Jews as Arabs in Palestine in 1948. Despite misperception that Israel was “created” in 1948 in an “Arab land,” Palestine’s 1948 population was about a million Arabs (Britain claimed there were 1.2 million) and (according even to Britain) some 600,000 Jews. That’s all. And there would have been untold more Jews but for repeated slaughters of homeland Jews by foreign rulers including the Romans, Byzantines and Crusaders, and their barring the gates, and European decrees against “transport of Jews to the East.” In recent times, the ruling Turks exiled many Jews in World War I, and Britain’s before-during-and-after-the Holocaust anti-Jewish Palestine blockade and actions in Europe blocked Jews from escaping to their homeland from Europe. How many Jews were thereby condemned to die in the Holocaust? How many Holocaust survivors languished in DP camps in Europe and in British intercepted “illegal immigrants’” camps in Cyprus in 1948?
Seventh, there were more Israel-absorbed Middle-Eastern Jewish refugees from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel. Rep. Tlaib et ilk’s “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian Refugee Rights” resolution pretends the 1948 war and its wake created only Arab refugees. But the truth is there were more mostly Israel-absorbed indigenously Middle-eastern Jewish refugees from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel. Americans mostly don’t known about them, and need to be told. Indeed, these Mizrahi Jews’ descendants today form the largest stream of Israelis, though a growing blend of Mizrahi, Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewish streams are blending in succeeding generations into a non-White Israeli stream through marriage.
Eighth, “the 1967 border” is not among the Holy Land’s holy places. The 1948 Arab-Israeli war ended in ceasefires formalized in ceasefire agreements. That between Israel and the invader Jordan, which left historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria hill country in Jordanian hands, and Israel nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle, expressly stated that the line drawn with a green pen represented a military ceasefire line only, without prejudice to either side’s international border claims. As such, it was consigned to history’s dustbin by renewed 1967 fighting between the same sides, again initiated by Jordan, succeeded by the 1967 war’s infinitely more defensible and more Jewishly meaningful to Israel ceasefire lines, along the Jordan River.
Ninth, Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem are not “occupied Palestinian territories.” Although the media calls “Judea and Samaria” the “biblical name” for “the West Bank,” it was that Hebrew-origin biblical name that had been in use all through post-biblical centuries, including by the UN itself in 1947: “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….” The invader Jordan rechristened Judea-Samaria as “the West Bank” of its kingdom in 1950 for the same reason the Romans had renamed Judaea as “Palestine” in 135 CE, to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews.
Jordan captured historic Jerusalem but not the new city mostly west of the walled Old City in the 1948 war and held it until ousted from west of the Jordan River by Israel in the 1967 war. The media still calls the historic part of the city – three times capital of a homeland Jewish state and no others in the past 3,000 years, with renewed Jewish majority since pre-Zionist 1800’s Turkish rule, “East” Jerusalem, to disassociate it from Jews. But “East Jerusalem” is not some suburb or satellite of historic Jerusalem, but that historic city itself.
Neither by history nor international treaty are either Judea-Samaria or historic Jerusalem “occupied Palestinian territory,” none of which “the Palestinians” have ever ruled ever.
Tenth, Jewish communities, towns, villages, neighborhoods over the old defunct 1949 ceasefire lines are not “settlements.” The media delights in contrasting “Palestinian neighborhoods, towns, villages” versus nearby “Israeli/Jewish settlements.” But “settlers” and “settlements” are Dirty Words, connoting illegitimate outsider presence. Stop saying this.
Summing Up
So let us decline the Squad’s invitation to debate “the Nakba” and “Palestinian Refugee Rights,” but instead make more known to Americans, not least younger ones, the above and other facts about the validity and justice of we Jews’ homeland claim, and ourselves stop saying, e.g., “The Palestinians …creation [instead of independence] of Israel …war that followed Israel’s creation [instead of Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction] … Palestinian refugee issue [as though there weren’t more Middle-Eastern Jewish refugees] ,,,1967 borders [instead of 1949 ceasefire lines] …West Bank and East Jerusalem …settlers and settlements …occupied Palestinian territories” etc. Is it any wonder, with we ourselves saying these things, that young Americans have more rachmones for Arabs’ than Jews’ Palestine, land of Israel, homeland claims?