WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: One thing Biden and the Saudis did agree upon is Israel. It must give up historic Jerusalem and defensible Judea-Samaria. Grassroots American Jews must not take this lying down.
The Response to Saudi Arabia Is Not for the US To Be Squadi America; American Jews Must Help Prevent This
It seems unclear on what if anything President Biden agreed with the Saudis on oil production, but this much is clear – they’re in synch on peace conditions between Israelis and Arabs.
Here’s the Jewish Press’ headline yesterday – Saudi Arabia: No Peace with Israel Without PA State on ’67 Borders, Capital in ‘East’ Jerusalem.
Here’s a Jerusalem Post’s headline Friday – Biden: I Support Two-States Based on Pre-1967 Lines.
And here’s JNS Friday – Biden Affirms Support of Two-State Solution ‘on 1967 Lines with Land Swaps’.
Here’s excerpts from that Jewish Press article on Biden’s visit:
“The US and Saudi Arabia issued a joint statement saying, ‘Regarding Israel-Palestinian issues, the two sides underscored their enduring commitment to a two-state solution’ ….
“The leaders noted their determination to remain closely coordinated on efforts to encourage the parties to demonstrate – through policies and actions – their commitment to a two-state solution….” [emphasis added, a little]
The Jewish Press article quoted the Saudi Foreign Minister that this Saudi position isn’t new. He cited the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002: “We have committed to a two-state settlement with a Palestinian state on the occupied territories with east Jerusalem as its capital – that’s our requirement for peace. That hasn’t changed.”
What else hasn’t changed is the identical position of the US Democratic party of Presidents Obama and Biden. As former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro put it (Times of Israel, 5/18/20, Democrats’ Stand on Annexation Poses a Dilemma for Israel) :
“Support for a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps remains a consensus policy within the Democratic Party ….”
If I could get you Two-Staters among You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly to read one riveting book on the Arab-Israeli conflict, it would be Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate, an “in the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmet” view, in selected Six Day War participants’ own moving words, not just of the battles themselves, but of what their involvement in that existential struggle meant for Israelis, and in a broader sense for all of us Jews. The book has moving flashbacks to the wars of 1956 and 1948, and before.
Read this book, The Lion’s Gate, and ask yourself are “The Palestinians” at all likely to “mutually agree” with Israelis on altering the pre-1967 war possession of The Old City with its Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif to them and the Philadelphia Inquirer) and Western Wall, on the narrow perilous hill-dominated corridor connecting the Israeli coastal plain to pre-1967 Jewish Jerusalem – Radar Hill and its like, Latrun, Ammunition Hill and the neighborhoods separating Mount Scopus from “green line” Jewish Jerusalem? On the Judea-Samaria ridge dominating the nine-miles-wide in the middle coastal plain and forming, with the Jordan Valley on the far side, Israel’s sole geographically defensible boundary, what the long meandering Jerusalem and elsewhere undifferentiated land-splitting 1949 Israel-invading Jordan ceasefire line precisely was not?
But, Gentle Reader, we Jews’ difficulty with the “two-state solution” is not just its being based on “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps,” as though those old 1949 ceasefire lines, obliterated and superseded by the 1967 war’s ceasefire lines, were among the Holy Land’s holy places. Our objection to this Saudi-US Democratic Party-Rest of the World (see UNSC 2334) Arab-Israeli conflict peace plan must be per se the very concept of a western Palestine, inside the land of Israel, Palestinian Arab state.
*** Look at a 3-D map of the land of Israel, western Palestine. There are no internal natural geographical features providing a militarily secure boundary for a tiny world’s-only Jewish state surrounded by Muslim Arab states. Look at a map of Jerusalem. It’s a single city, not two. Physically, it can’t be divided half Jewish, half Arab. And it’s not just Jerusalem’s geographical layout that from our perspective can’t be divided. In The Lion’s Gate (p. 261), Moshe Milo, a non-religious kibbutznik-raised farmer, a paratroop sergeant once assigned to Mt. Scopus and now on his way late in the afternoon of the Six Day War’s first day from the cancelled Sinai paratroop jump to the Jerusalem front, put it this way:
“We have a nation now at last. A Jewish state exists. Our country holds half of Jerusalem. But it is the vacant half, the barren half, the half that excludes the Old City, and our people’s most sacred sites. This I think on Mount Scopus, manning my post above Israel’s ancient capital. I think that the exile of the Jews has not yet come to an end.”
*** The Jewish Press article cited above quotes PA leader Abbas sounding off, during President Biden’s visit to Bethlehem Friday, while “Biden stood silent,” railing against “Israeli occupation of our land … apartheid … unilateral actions … the Nakba … the occupation,” to all of which Hana Levi Julian, the Jewish Press article author, alas not the American President, appends:
“As is made clear in Palestinian Authority school textbooks, the Ramallah government aims for the establishment of its hoped-for state in the entire state of Israel; the so-called ‘two state solution’ is seen as an initial, temporary step, which ’two state’ supporters fail to recognize – or choose to ignore.”
*** We unWoke grassroots American Jews, Democrats along with Republicans, have to make the homeland case of our people. By history, three thousand years’ continuous physical presence, including in thrice-native Jewish state capital historic Jerusalem, with its renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman Turkish rule, and international treaty, San Remo and the Jewish national home-reconstituting Palestine Mandate, have the strongest land of Israel, western Palestine, homeland claim. It’s not “contested, disputed.” It’s Ours, just like “the Palestinians” say that it’s “Theirs.”
*** This does not leave the world’s Poor Precious “Palestinians,” a millennium and a half less Palestinian than Jews, devoid of a homeland, a Palestine homeland. They’re the majority population of Jordan, eastern Palestine, 78% of Palestine’s whole as defined in the Palestine Mandate itself. But Jordan’s not “Democratic & Arab”? So make it such by making its Hashemite king a constitutional monarch, like Liz. Yes, the fathers and grandfathers of some Jordanians once lived west of the Jordan River, but a greater number of majority-Mizrahi Israel’s population today are descended from Jews who once lived, indigenously if in dhimmitude, in North African and Middle-eastern Arab lands and Iran.
Make the case.