WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: We American Jews, not personally part of the great struggle for the Jewish homeland’s sovereign redemption and existential wars to preserve it, lack standing to tell Israel how to make peace with the Arabs. But we can kibbitz, as here I do.
Dear Israel:
I’m not among the majority of American Jews who petitioned the President of the United States (Trump, natch, Biden would have signed the petition) to demand Israel agree to an inside-the-land-of-Israel “two-state solution” with borders “hewing precisely” to the half-century-ago-superseded 1949 ceasefire lines (which they miscalled “the 1967 borders”) save for any agreed “territorial adjustments.” By me, these petitioners lacked, inter alia, standing.
Instead I pal around with those of us seeking to get through to our fellow Americans the legitimacy and justice of our Jewish homeland of Israel in its historic and international treaty-stated Jordan River boundaries, including historic Jerusalem and defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland. There are three things you can do for me to help me along in this mission, but I too, of course, lack standing to demand things of you, so let me kibbitz you this.
[1] Make the Continuous Homeland Presence Case
If the Iranians could have picked the place you religiously take visiting dignitaries on their arrival in Israel, they’d have picked the same place you did – Yad Vashem. “See,” they’d gloat, “even the Israelis acknowledge Israel was created because of the Holocaust. So why should The Palestinians suffer?”
I appreciate that Yad Vashem, which I’ve visited, is an exceedingly moving memorial, and the immense impact it deservedly has upon visitors. I don’t ask you to change where you take VIPs. But build on Yad Vashem’s ample grounds a Continuous Jewish Presence Museum, vividly refuting key Jewish homeland delegitimizing canards – [a] the denigrating of biblical era homeland Jewish history, [b] claims we were “exiled” by Rome and were gone for close to two thousand years, and [c] that Jews were an insignificant minority when Israel was “created in 1948.”
[a] Show that Biblical Era Jewish History Happened: Israel by us is the Promised Land, but to a world that joins Muslims in exclusively using the Muslim name for the Jews’ (and Christians’) Temple Mount, and with Palestinian Arabs claiming ever-present descent from second millennium BCE Canaanites, show the exceedingly ample archeological evidence of our Biblical era physical presence, not least the eighth century BCE enemy king’s House of David inscription and other enemies’ references, the Temple Mount itself with its evidences of the Second and even First Jewish Temple, the Western Wall, Hezekiah’s tunnel, and remains throughout the land. Ask where these Canaanite-descended Palestinian Arabs were while Israelites were defending Israel and Judah from Assyrians and Babylonians; when Maccabee-led Jews liberated Judaea from Seleucid successors of Alexander the Great, and defended it in major wars a half-century apart against Rome.
[b] Show that We Weren’t “Exiled” by Rome and Weren’t Gone for Two Thousand Years: Show the remains of post-Revolt Roman-Byzantine period synagogues throughout the land, Roman recognition of the Patriarch as head of the Yishuv until the fifth century CE, homeland scholars’ and sages’ work products including the Mishnah and Jerusalem Talmud, and that twenty thousand or more homeland Jews fought in their own self-mustered battalions alongside the 614 Persian invaders against the hated-Romans’ Byzantine heirs, a military action that Gedaliah Alon wrote in The Jews In Their Land in the Talmudic Age (p. 16) showed “Palestinian Jewry’s awareness of itself as a political force, capable of taking action.” Show Bahat’s map of a hundred ninth century homeland Jewish communities we know of today. Show the Crusaders’ own acknowledgments of Jews’ fighting them in Jerusalem and alone at Haifa for a whole month. Show homeland Jews’ tenacious Jerusalem presence under Mamluk rule and in their four holy cities of Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron during Ottoman Turks’ four-century misrule.
[c] Show that Jews Weren’t an Insignificant Minority in 1948: A key factor in Western publics’ misperception of Palestinian Arabs as the land’s indigenous people is misperception of Jews being only an insignificant part of the population in 1948. Refute this. Make clear that Palestine’s 1948 population was only about a million or so Arabs and some 600,000 Jews (e.g., Katz in Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, p. 23). But don’t stop there. Show that there’d have been untold more Jews but for [a] the successive foreign conquerors who ruled between Roman destruction of Judaea in 135 CE and Israel’s rebirth in 1948 as the land’s next native state having repeatedly slaughtered the homeland’s Jews; [b] these conquerors having habitually barred the gates to returning Jews, down through the before-during-and-after-the Holocaust anti-Jewish British blockade; [c] medieval European decrees against “transport of Jews to the East”; and [d] foreign rulers’ prohibiting land purchase by Jews, down through the British during the Mandate, in defiance of their Mandate trustee duty to achieve “close settlement of Jews on the land.” But don’t stop there either. Count the untold Jews prevented by the 1930’s British anti-Jewish immigration “White Paper” from escaping back home from Europe and hence condemned to death in the Holocaust, and count the Holocaust survivors penned up in “Displaced Persons” camps in Europe and in British prison camps in Cyprus in 1948. Despite all of this, we were still a good third of the population in 1948, and would have been the big majority but for all of this. Western publics have to be told this.
The fundamental point to be made is we never physically as well as otherwise abandoned our homeland. Historian Parkes recognized this, Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine (p. 266), in asserting that the continuous tenacious homeland-claiming presence of the Yishuv, “in spite of every discouragement,” wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.” Prime Minister Begin, in his “Foreword to the Second Edition” of Katz’ classic work Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, likewise recognized Jews’ unbroken homeland presence’s importance: “The most moving chapter in this book is that on the continuous Jewish presence in Palestine. I was glad to learn that this particular chapter has been disseminated in special editions in several languages.” (See also Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine.”)
[2] Show the World You’re “Non-White”
Always perceptive Jonathan Tobin wrote last week, Who’s To Blame for Young American and Democrat Coolness Toward Israel, JNS, 5/27/22, that “though the majority of Israelis are people of color who trace their origins to former homes in the Middle East and North Africa,” still “many Americans view Israelis and Jews as possessors of ‘white privilege’,” with, in these Americans’ minds, all the negative attributes flowing therefrom. Among these are “apartheid” and “settler colonial,” as though Jews desperately escaping from centuries of persecution as despised outsiders in Europe – Pale of Settlement, ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, pogrom – arrived in Palestine as agents of the European powers from which they were fleeing.
Israelis’ non-White composition is as unknown to Westerners as is their substantial 1948 presence. So send descendants of Yemenite, Ethiopian and other North African Jews to visible key posts in the UN and the West, and in just plain people-to-people contact capacities. (It might even have a salutary effect in making American Jews a little less arrogant, in speaking one-on-one to non-White Jews whose ancestors had never left the Mideast, in telling them “We Woke-White American Jews know better than Israelis what Israel should do to make peace with the Arabs.”)
[3] Stop Calling Your Adversary in the Fight Over Palestine “THE Palestinians”
It would be difficult to conceive of a more unhelpful thing in our uphill struggle to convince the world that we Jews, not Palestinian Arabs, are the indigenous people of the land of Israel that’s part of Palestine than that we ourselves go around calling our adversaries in that struggle over that part of Palestine “THE Palestinians.” This is Insanity. Stop.
Even the AP has acknowledged that during the Mandate everyone living there was “Palestinian.” Indeed, as David Bar-Illan, late Editor of the Jerusalem Post (at least then still officially the Palestine Post) and of its ground-breaking “Eye On the Media” column, pointed out over and over, Palestine’s Jews referenced themselves as Palestinian more than did its Arabs. So take back Jewish equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian.”
I bid you go back and read a bit more of then Prime Minister Begin’s “Foreword to the Second Edition” of Katz’s Battleground:
“One of the most important services rendered by this book is hinted at in its sub-title, ‘Fact and Fantasy in Palestine.’ The impertinent campaign of the Arab propagandists in appropriating to themselves the name of ‘Palestine’ (as though theirs was the land) and ‘Palestinians’ (as though they owned it) has unfortunately borne a good deal of fruit. The fact that Palestine was simply the name given over the centuries by non-Jews to the country of the Jews; that Palestine as the Jewish heritage is an ineffaceable fact of world history, indeed fo the Moslem as well as of the Christian tradition, has been obscured by the weight of heavily-financed and admittedly efficient Arab propaganda. So much so that even many Jews have been drawn into the semantic trap.”
So, Israel, kindly do these kibbitzed things for me. And while you’re at it, stop calling Jewish communities – towns, villages, neighborhoods – in Judea-Samaria (“West Bank” being a Dirty Word) and historic Jerusalem “settlements.”