WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: I had a guest column on Stu’s website last week. I wrote that our homeland, the land of Israel, extends from the Sea to the Jordan River, including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem. A reader commented that I ignore the room’s elephant – Palestinian nationalism that can only be fulfilled in an inside the land of Israel “two-state solution.” I countered that the elephant he ignores is Palestine in its entirety, with Jewish and Arab nationalism residing respectively in the Jewish west and Palestinian Arab-majority east.
“The Elephant in the Room” – Palestinian Arabs or Palestine West & East?
By me, former Philadelphia Daily News and now independent journalist Stu Bykofsky wins the Sirius Black Award for having emerged into the sunlight from close to a half-century in Azkeban, the Philadelphia Inquirer-Daily News premises, with his mind almost intact.
The less-than-Israel-infatuated Inq, as long-time subscribers hereto doubtless recall, was the chief object of my disaffection during the early years of these weekly BSMW epistles. The Daily News, as habitually obsessed with covering sports as its sister Inq with miscovering the homeland of Jews, nonetheless took a few doubtless Inq-inspired shots at it, one an inappropriate front-page-lede survey of support for Israel among Green Bay Packer fans. As BSMW noted at the time, more to the Philly Daily News’ shtick would have been surveying support for the Green Packers among Israeli fans.
Stu Bykofsky for a couple years now has had his own highly reader-interactive website, www.stubykofsky.com, featuring mostly his own postings on Philly and U.S. politics and life, with plentiful easily-posted comments by readers, comments to comments, and comments to them. Well worth your visit.
A fortnight ago, Stu, with whom I mostly agree, conferred upon me a much-appreciated invitation to post on his site a guest column with its hook right from my tackle box – a commentary on Jews’ right to all of our homeland, starting from Rep. Tlaib et ilk’s new U.S. House of Representatives’ bill to bestow official American hechsher upon “the Nakba” and “Palestinian Arab Refugees’ Rights.” To view my June 5 posting itself and exchange of comments thereon, especially two sets between me and Stu reader “Tom” (maybe more by the time you read this), visit Stu’s site, scroll down to the second set of articles and look for “Guest Essay: Israel’s Right To Exist, Where It Is.” Summaries of my essay and of Tom’s comments, and in full my replies to them, follow.
“Guest Essay: Israel’s Right To Exist, Where It Is”
I began that Rep. Tlaib’s House Resolution 1123, “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian Refugees; Rights,” did us a favor by making clear that it’s the “catastrophe” of the 1948 independence of a Jewish State period that’s the “Catastrophe” to our homeland’s foes. So I recapped our Jewish people’s three-millennia homeland presence, starting from the hill country sites of the late second millennium BCE through the biblical period; that we weren’t exiled by Rome but remained a significant presence in the land; and that 78% of Mandated Palestine became all-Arab Jordan and 22% today’s Israel, the land of Israel’s next native state. I referenced Diaspora Jews’ persecuted history in Europe and Muslim lands; that Israel absorbed more indigenously Middle-eastern Jews from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel; and that Israel today is majority Mizrahi (Middle-eastern), not “White.” I called on grassroots American Jews to “forcefully and forthrightly stand up for the historic, international treaty-recognized Jewish national home – Israel, where it is, with its current borders and historic Jerusalem.”
The First Comment by Tom
I got a smattering of supportive Stu reader comments, one of which cited the mutual benefits the US and Israel provide each other. I could not resist appending to my appreciative reply: “But the US administration must understand that Israel just cannot go back to the existentially perilous, historic Jerusalem excluding ceasefire lines of 1949 in a western Palestine ‘two-state solution,’” and that Palestinian Arabs are Jordan’s, eastern Palestine’s, majority population.”
Enter Tom, defending a “two-state solution,” not necessarily on the 1949 lines, with Jerusalem maybe an “international” rather than divided city. He sees a need to satisfy inside the land of Israel Palestinian nationalism. “The lack of historical roots for Palestinian nationalism does not mean it does not exist.” He believes it cannot be met by Israeli “annexation” over the ’49 lines, with either “transfer” or “dhimmi-hood/second class rights for the Arabs,” or even, “because of the practical consequences,” with Palestinian Arabs’ full citizenship and voting rights in the Israeli state. There have to be two western Palestine states.
My Reply to Tom #1
Hi, Tom,
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. A majority of America’s Jews agree with you. Part of the reason I don’t is that Palestinian Arabs are already the majority population of eastern Palestine, the 78% of the Palestine Mandate east of the River, today’s Jordan. The Mandate clause allowing Britain to “withhold” part of the Mandate from the Jewish national home was limited to east of the River. If Jordan’s not “Democratic & Arab,” make its king a constitutional monarch like Elizabeth, don’t renege on the Mandate by taking away much of the 22% the Mandate recognized as the Jews’.
The main reason I reject a western Palestine “two-state solution” is that Jerusalem (three times Jewish state capital and renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Turkish rule) and Judea-Samaria (what the UN itself called it in 1947) are the core parts of the historic homeland of Jews. And the Jordan River and Judea-Samaria ridge is a natural defensible border. The meandering 1949 ceasefire lines (thank you for not miscalling them “Israel’s 1967 borders”) are not. Nor would be other inside-the-land-of-Israel lines.
Israel’s Jews, most of whom reject an inside-the-land-of-Israel two-state solution (as do the Palestinian Arabs, who want all of Palestine) are not ultra-nationalist claimers of a “Greater Israel.” It’s those who’d take away historic Jerusalem and the Judea-Samaria hill country heartland from us Jews who are seeking a “Lesser Israel” than what by history and international treaty is the Jewish national home. God knows we need it, and it needs to be militarily defensible and Jewishly meaningful.
Tom #2
Tom begins: “But you ignore the elephant in the room, which is the Arab population who live there.” He says the Mandate was “legally abrogated” by the UNGA’s 1947 partition resolution. He says that if you favor annexation and full citizenship rights for Judea-Samaria Arabs, “then you are with Tlaib….You should work with her.” Annexation with second class citizenry or “transfer” would betray what Israel is. “My position is not the slightest claim that Israel’s existence is in any way unjustified or illegitimate,” but the choice is “half a loaf or none,” so to avoid destruction “by outside forces or its own acts,” Israel should agree to a two-state solution. “It is not an argument for a ‘lesser Israel,’ but for Israel period.”
My Reply to Tom #2
[1] “The elephant in the room,” Tom, is Palestine, all of it, west and east of the Jordan River, both of which were embraced within the UN-officially-adopted League of Nations Palestine Mandate, which recognized my Jewish people’s historic connection with Palestine and specified reconstituting there the Jewish national home. The Mandate gave an option to its trustee, Britain, to “withhold” from it only the portion of Palestine east of the River, which Britain with alacrity did, creating in that 78% of Palestine all-Arab Transjordan. The UN General Assembly’s 1947 resolution to again partition between Arabs and Jews the remaining 22% which Britain’s excision of Jordan from the Mandate left for the Jews had no power to renege on the Mandate, and was anyway unanimously rejected by Arabs, intent as they were on “driving the Jews into the sea.” Palestinian Arabs are the majority population of Jordan, sitting on 78% of the Palestine Mandate
[2] Your suggestion that we “work with Tlaib,” whose House resolution is titled “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian Refugees’ Rights,” is unrealistic in the extreme. Her “Nakba” [“Catastrophe”] is that Israel exists. If Israel was “created” in an Arab land in 1948, how is it that a homeland army of homeland Jews threw back and then some the instant invasion of several neighboring Arab states, in which Palestinian Arabs fully participated on the Arab side? It’s true that we Jews were only a third of Palestine’s 1948 population, but the exclusively foreign empires which ruled between Rome’s final defeat of ancient Israel in 135 CE and Israel’s independence as the land’s next native state in 1948 [Palestinian Arabs have never ruled Palestine ever] slaughtered homeland Jews over and over, barred Diaspora Jews’ return home, including the Mandate duty-defying Britain in its before-during-and-after the Holocaust anti-Jewish Palestine blockade. Count on the Jewish population side the homeland Jews slaughtered by the (mostly non-Arab) foreign rulers over the centuries, and the homeland-striving Holocaust survivors locked in European “Displaced Persons” camps in 1948 and in British prison camps on Cyprus. We’d have been the 1948 population majority, not just a third, but for all that.
[3] And as for Tlaib’s “Palestinian Refugees’ Rights,” more indigenously Middle-eastern Jews were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands in the 1948 war and its wake than Arabs left tiny Israel. Israel’s population today is majority Mizrahi (Middle-eastern origin) Jews.
By history and international treaty, San Remo and the Mandate, Tom, the land of Israel, the Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, City of David and all) included – is the homeland of Jews, including the right of endangered Diaspora Jews to come home, and we will not give it up to Arabs who have a four-times larger Palestine homeland next door, along with almost all of the land of the Middle East.
Where We Come Out
Stu site commentator Tom isn’t alone in ignoring that Britain’s early 1920’s excision of Jordan from the Palestine Mandate constituted a 78/22% partition of Palestine between, respectively, Arabs and Jews. The world, in seeking to partition between Arabs and Jews the 22% of Palestine that its first partition left for the Jews, excludes the eastern Palestine elephant by moving inward a wall of the room. The world says in effect, “the part of Palestine that’s Arabs’ is Arabs’, the part that’s Jews’ is partitionable.” Rabbit, shmabbit, the world’s pulling an elephant out of a hat.