#1136 10/30/22 – We Can’t Rest on “9 Miles Wide in the Lowland Middle” Being a Danger; We Have To Claim the Entirety of the Land of Israel as Legally and Historically Ours

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Martin Sherman wrote this week that PM Lapid’s UN speech, on top of President Biden’s reiterated position on Palestine, has restored international focus on “a two-state solution.”  He cited the cogent geographical reasons Israel cannot go along.  But others will say, as with “the right of return,” if the Jewish state can’t survive this, that’s just too bad for the Jews.  We must make the case that the “right” to a western Palestine Arab state, like “the right of return,” doesn’t exist, that the whole land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan River, is Jews’.     

We Can’t Rest on “9 Miles Wide in the Lowland Middle” Being a Danger; We Have To Claim the Entirety of the Land of Israel as Legally and Historically Ours

Israel defense establishment veteran Dr. Martin Sherman has a factually sound article carried by Israpundit this week, Into the Fray: The Perils of Palestine: A Multi-Dimensional Menace to Israel, analyzing from a geographical standpoint what he called “existential dangers for Israel” of a western Palestine sovereign Arab state.

The case Dr. Sherman makes this week is not new.  He makes it now because, he says, due to the Biden administration’s efforts and “the recent injudicious address to the UN” by Israel’s interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid, “lamentably, the specter of Palestinian statehood has once again re-emerged to occupy the forefront of the public discourse.”

What bothers me in reading his article is not that I think that the existential geographical dangers Dr. Sherman cites aren’t real.  The existential peril of a coastal sliver Jewish homeland state literally overlooked by Arab state-dominating hills is self-evidently utterly real.  What bothers me in reading this article is what bothers me in reading articles about the Arab-claimed “right of return.”  The mainstream media says Israelis and other Jews reject Arabs’ “right of return” because “Israel as the Jewish state” would end.  Non-Jews reading such articles would likely draw from them, “Well, if the Arabs are entitled to that right of return, then that’s just too bad for the Jews.”  Similarly, “if the Arabs are entitled to a western Palestine sovereign state, then – “If the Jews would no longer still have a geographically viable remaining Jewish state, that’s just too bad for the Jews.”

The case we must make to the world regarding both “a Palestinian state” and an Arab “right of return” is not that implementing such rights would cause the Jewish state’s end, which they would, but that such “rights” themselves are not real.  On both legal [the Palestine Mandate’s Jewish national home] and historical [see, e.g., Jacob Sivak, Algemeiner, this week, 10/24/22, An Inconvenient Truth: The Jewish People Never Left the Land of Israel; see also my book, Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine] grounds, the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, is ours.

The very name of this but-for-some-of-us-Jews universally clamored for western Palestine Arab state – “a Palestinian state” – is doubly misleading.  First, “a Palestinian state,” a sovereign state with a Palestinian Arab majority sitting on 78% of Mandated Palestine, Jordan, demographically  and geographically exists.  Second, it’s imbalanced in the extreme to frame the Palestine issue as the apportioning of a place called “Palestine” between “Palestinians” and Jews.  Palestinian Jews are Palestinian too.  Who said so?  The United Nations said so in its Palestine partition resolution of 1947, in which it called the place’s Arabs and its Jews “the two Palestinian peoples.”  And the Jews said so too – e.g., the Palestine Electric Company, the Palestine Post (today’s Jerusalem Post), the American League For a Free Palestine, Jewish entities all.  “Palestine” and “Palestinian” aren’t inherently Dirty Words; they’ve been made dirty by their hijacking by Arabs as exclusively theirs.

Dr. Sherman and others correctly point out the geographical reasons why a truncated Israel couldn’t securely coexist with an Arab state carved from it, any more than it could continue demographically to exist following inundation by millions of Arabs enjoying “a right of return.”  These are reasons why we must make our arguments against “the two-state solution” and Arab “right of return,” but these aren’t the only arguments to the world we must make.  We have to claim the land of Israel in its entirety – historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria as the very heart of it – as our Jewish people’s historically and legally ours Jewish national home, with eastern Palestine being Palestinian Arabs’ 78% of Mandated Palestine Palestinian Arab home.