WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Even if you believe in a western Palestine, land of Israel, “two-state solution,” assert vigorously that three-millennia homeland Jewish history historically happened. Three canards that directly deny this are “Zionist entity, Greater Israel and Palestinian Arabs as ‘the Palestinians.’” Recognize the damage these slurs purvey, and vigorously contest them by making the affirmative case our three-millennia Jewish homeland history happened.
Wholly Apart From “Two-States,” ALL American Jews Must Vigorously Assert Homeland Jewish History Happened
Ok, even if, like most American Jews, you agree with President Biden – Jerusalem Post, 7/15/22, Biden: I Support Two States, Based on Pre-1967 Lines – you’re not relieved of your duty to assert strongly that homeland Jewish history happened. As it says at the home page top of an obscure website (ours, www.factsonisrael.com):
“If you forfeit the language, you forfeit our heritage and history.”
Of all the media’s and world’s Jewish history-denying poisoned pejoratives, many of which are enumerated on our website’s “Toxic Terms” and “Dirty Words” pages, I’d have you combat three which deeply deny our people’s three-millennia homeland history, two of which at least we ourselves unthinkingly use.
“Zionist Entity” doesn’t sound harmful. We proudly call ourselves “Zionists” and claim credit for Zionists having brought about our homeland’s sovereign rebirth. But that’s not how our enemies, striving to date Jewish presence in Palestine to the late nineteenth century-begun “Zionist” movement, have cast the widely-accepted meaning of “Zionist Entity.” Wikipedia:
“Zionist entity, Zionist regime and Zionist enemy are pejorative terms for the State of Israel which are used by some Arabs and Muslims. Many commentators believe that the terms are used in an attempt to de-legitimize Israel by emphasizing Zionism, the Jewish national movement which led to Israel’s founding.”
“Israel’s founding” in that quotation is itself highly objectionable, of course, as what happened in 1948 was restoration of the homeland Yishuv’s independence, not “founding” as though ex nihilo, but the point of calling Israel “the Zionist entity,” as the Wikipedia article states, is to suppress pre-1800’s Jewish connection to the land.
There’s a bit of truth to the old pre-state saw of “Zionism” being “a first Jew giving money to a second Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine,” in that the Zionist movement brought an invigoration of Diaspora Jews’ homeland return that from ancient times had never ceased. Katz, Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, p. 97:
“Modern Zionism did indeed start the count of the waves of immigration after 1882, but only the frame and capacity for organization were new. The living movement to the land had never ceased.”
The affirmative case we must make is that on defeating the Jews’ final Bar-Kochba revolt in 135 CE, the Romans did not “exile” Judaea’s surviving Jews, but that a core homeland Yishuv remained all through the continuous foreign empire rule centuries between the times of Hadrian and Herzl, “in spite,” as historian Parkes put it, Whose Land: A History of the Peoples of Palestine, p. 266, “of every discouragement.” Indeed, “every discouragement” included foreign empire rulers’ repeated massacres of homeland-clinging Jews, persecution of Jews living there, prohibition of Jewish immigration, and foreign state rulers’ prohibition of “transport of Jews to the East” from medieval times down through the before-during-and-after-the-Holocaust British anti-Jewish blockade. Even so, 1948 Palestine was not homogeneously Arab. There were about a million Arabs and some 600,000 Jews in the sparsely-populated land.
So make the point that Israel isn’t “the Zionist entity” but the never-relinquished homeland of the Jewish people from ancient times to the present. See, e.g., Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine (Amazon; tons of footnotes citing authorities).
The second slur I’d have you contest is “Greater Israel.” The media et ilk mockingly apply the label “ultra-nationalist Believers in a Greater Israel” to Jews who assert that our rightfully-entitled Jewish homeland doesn’t stop at the 1949 ceasefire lines (miscalled “Israel’s 1967 borders”) but extends to the Jordan River, embracing the Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, Old City, City of David and all) – i.e., Palestine west of the River, the historic land of Israel in its entirety.
What these mockers omit is that western Palestine – “from the River to the Sea” – is the 22% of Palestine (the other 78% being today’s Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan) that the League of Nation recognized in the Palestine Mandate as having an historical Jewish connection justifying the Mandate’s specification there of a reconstituted Jewish national home. The Mandate allowed excision of Jordan but not other portions of Palestine therefrom, which constituted the partition of Palestine in 1922 between Arabs and Jews. (And btw, the United Nations in its 1947 Arab-rejected partition resolution didn’t call Judea-Samaria “the West Bank,” it called them “Samaria and Judea.”)
So it’s not Jews who claim the entirety of that 22% as legally as well as historically Jewish who claim a “Greater” Israel, but those who demand a second splitting of that Jewish 22% who are howling for a Lesser Israel. But you won’t read that in the media. Even if you agree with this second splitting of Palestine, don’t go along with labeling those of us who see the defensible Judea-Samaria ridge and most meaningful historic Jerusalem as intrinsic parts of the land of Israel as being groundlessly-fantasizing “Ultra-nationalist Believers in a Greater Israel.”
Palestine and Palestinian aren’t inherently Dirty Words. It’s their hijacking by our Jewish homeland’s enemies, with which we unthinkingly go along, that makes them Dirty. Here’s 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 of 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.”
David Bar-Illan, late editor of the Jerusalem Post and writer of its ground-breaking Eye On The Media column, over and over cited the far greater use of “Palestine” and “Palestinian” during the Mandate by Jews of themselves than by Arabs. And did you know that in its 1947 Palestine partition resolution the United Nations referred to Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples”?
It’s self-defeating for we Jews ourselves to refer to our opponents in the long struggle between Arabs and Jews over Palestine as “the Palestinians.” Jews there are Palestinian too, indeed were Palestinian first.
So let’s re-entrench in our own minds and then vigorously endeavor to instill in others’ that Israel is the three-millennia Jewish homeland, not “the Zionist entity”; that believers like me in historic Jerusalem and the Judea-Samaria hill country heartland being intrinsic inseparable parts of our Jewish homeland of Israel aren’t fantasizing “ultra-nationalist Believers in a Greater Israel”; and that Palestinian Arabs are Palestinian Arabs and not “the Palestinians.”