WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Rabbi Fischer is movingly right that through close to two thousand years of [mostly] Exile, we Jews have never given up our Jerusalem-capital Land of Israel homeland claim. But, like Ben-Gurion and the pre-State Zionist movement’s leaders before him, he doesn’t give credit enough to the continuous post-biblical homeland physical presence of the Yishuv.
Rabbi Dov Fischer: “Simply Put, We Never Gave Up Our Claim”
It is said of Napoleon that while walking through the streets of Paris one summer day, he passed by a synagogue from which cries of lamentation were loudly issuing. Inquiring what was the matter, he was told that the Jews were lamenting their capital Jerusalem and its Temple’s destruction. “I hadn’t heard about it,” he said. “It happened almost two thousand years ago,” he was told. “Any people with memory and commitment like that,” Napoleon replied, “will surely get their Jerusalem back.”
And so in our own time we have. But most of the world (e.g., UNSC 2334, “…will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties ….”), the American President (e.g., Jerusalem Post, 7/15/22, Biden: I Support Two States, Based on Pre-1967 Lines), and (by me, shockingly) most American Jews, in favoring this land of Israel, western Palestine “two-state solution,” do not accept this.
And so I was pleased to encounter this week (thank you, Gary and Howard) Rabbi Dov Fischer’s American Spectator article, 7/17/22, The Three Saddest Weeks in the Jewish Calendar – and Why Jerusalem Will Never Again Be Divided, delving into we Jews’ historical and religious actions over the past eighteen hundred years he sums up as “Simply put, we never gave up our claim” [emphasis original].
Rabbi Fischer packs a lot into three pages. He starts off by pointing out what ought to disturb the world’s Christians more than it apparently does:
“Although his [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’] motive is to negate Jewish bonds with the Land of Israel, by definition he likewise deems Christianity a lie. If there were no Jews in Israel – Bethlehem, Galilee, Jerusalem – then the Books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – all originally in Hebrew –are falsehoods. Never happened. If there was no Jewish Temple on Mount Zion, then there was no Jesus there. Thus, Jesus likewise is a myth.” [emphasis original]
He goes on to state that the two Jewish Temples of the Jews’ biblical kingdoms followed by Maccabean Judaea stood successively for more than a thousand years, and that we Jews are still there while our ancient kingdoms’ conquerors and destroyers – Babylonians, Alexander’s successors, and Romans – have “disappeared from the face of the earth.”
He goes on that while the Romans after finally defeating the Bar Kochba revolt renamed Judaea as “Palestine,” after the old long-gone biblical Philistines [not Arafat’s ancestors], there were no “Arab ‘Palestinians’” until “long, long later,” even Mohammed himself having lived in the 600s CE. Indeed, “the fiction of an Arab ‘Palestine’ was fabricated only in 1964 and did not gain wide use until Israel won the 1967 Six-Day war.” During the Mandate, the term “Palestine” was more used by and of Jews than of Arabs, citing, e.g., the Palestine Post (today’s Jerusalem Post) and the Irgun’s American League for a Free Palestine.
Rabbi Fischer then cites numerous Jews’ religious practices, showing that “through nearly two millennia of Exile, Jews never wavered on our claim to Jerusalem and Israel,” not least “The Three Weeks,” this year July 17 through August 7, including fast days and other observances which he details, mourning the fall of the First and Second Jewish Commonwealths of ancient times.
Rabbi Fischer concludes:
“Perhaps most importantly, this period of Three Weeks, which Jews have observed annually for 2,000 years, is a core reason that Israel came back into being as a Jewish country after two millennia of Exile and why we lived to see in our own days the reunification of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish people. Simply put, we never gave up our claim. We never stopped yearning and praying for The Return….” [emphasis original]
Well said, Rabbi Fischer. But nudge (a term, says MacMillan, of Scandinavian [along with Yiddish] origin) that I am, I can’t leave it at that. Indeed, I wrote a book on it, Israel 3,000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3,000 Year Presence in Palestine. Beyond that “we never stopped yearning and praying for The Return” by the bulk of our people living permanently persecuted lives in the Diaspora, historian James Parkes pithily put it that we never left our land of Israel homeland, not withstanding homeland Jew-persecuting Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Arabs and all. Parkes:
“It was, perhaps, inevitable that Zionists should look back to the heroic period of the Maccabees and Bar Cochba, but their real title deeds were written by the less dramatic but equally heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.” Parkes, Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine, p. 266.
I ended my, alas, rare book by lamenting that Ben-Gurion, in enumerating the many bases of Israel’s sovereign rebirth while standing beneath Herzl’s portrait in a Tel Aviv museum on May 14, 1948, had failed to include in that list the real-title-deeds continuous post-biblical homeland presence of the Jewish Yishuv. Citing some instances of Diaspora Jews fleeing from nineteenth century European pogroms back home, I concluded:
“And so too has it been in every age the presence, beacon, magnet of the Yishuv, at times diminished to a pummeled minor minority, that has made the millennia-long return of countless generations of Jews possible, even thinkable, and formed the continuous generational link between ancient Israelites and Israelis today.”