WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The Jewish people are not “settlers” in the land of Israel, where we’ve lived without interruption for three thousand years. One hundred nations just criticized Israel, and ergo Jews, for reacting to UN referral to the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion of Israeli “occupation, settlement and annexation” of “Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East [i.e., historic] Jerusalem.” Stand with Israel on this.
Jews Have Lived in Our Land of Israel for 3,000 Years, and For the First 2,900 of Them, Nobody Called Us Jews Living There “Settlers”
Some years ago, the ZOA gave Lee and me a little table in the anteroom of the New York City hotel ballroom in which it was holding its 1,200-attendee Gala Dinner to hawk our book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z during the cocktail hour. Truth to tell, I had mixed emotions. If you don’t think a kosher Gala Dinner’s hour-long cocktail hour’s hors d’oeuvres are worth not missing, get yourself invited to the ZOA’s in New York.
Part way through, a young man came up to me and we got into quite a conversation about Israel reporting terminology. I told him that what he was saying was just what I’d just read in an Algemeiner on-line article. He asked: “What did you think of that article?” “I agreed with it completely.” “I wrote that article.” He said, making his way toward the cocktails, he’d introduce Lee and me to his editor, which a few days later he did. We wrote about half-a-dozen Algemeiner articles, one of which was quoted by world-class Elder of Ziyon and was excerpted in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations’ Daily Alert, which is hitting a home run in pro-Israel article writing. Not quite worth missing that Gala Dinner’s cocktail hour’s hors d’oeuvres, but close.
A key point that Lee and I made in that article was that our Jewish people have lived in our homeland of Israel for three-thousand years, and that during the first twenty-nine hundred of those years nobody had called Jews living there “settlers.” We also made some other points in that article, but that one, I think, included in the Conf. of Pres.’ Daily Alert excerpt, was what garnered that major league recognition.
Eminent British historian and theologian James Parkes wrote in Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine (p. 266) that we Jews make a great mistake in emphasizing “Exile & Return,” instead of continuous homeland physical presence. He put it this way:
“The omission allowed the anti-Zionist, whether Jewish, Arab or European, to paint an entirely false picture of the wickedness of Jewry in trying to re-establish a two-thousand-year-old claim to the country, indifferent to everything that had happened in the intervening period.”
But is a picture of eighteen-hundred years’ all-but-absence really “an entirely false picture”? I’d wondered, over years of hearing over and again the widely-believed perception that “the Romans exiled the Jews” and that the land had become homogeneously Arab centuries ago, just how false or true a picture that was. If it’s true that we Jews remained in our homeland all through the post-Biblical centuries from Hadrian to Herzl, not just as stray individuals but as a vibrant, organized, meaningful, openly Jewish homeland-claiming Yishuv, then that’s the answer to the claim that we Jews there today are “settlers,” that we’re “occupying Palestinian lands.”
So taken was I with this issue that when a chance meeting with a non-vanity publisher of “Judaica” books offered me the opportunity to research and write a book to be called, e.g., Harry Potter and The Jewish People’s Permanent Presence in Palestine, I leapt at it. Ok, it’s really called Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, but I can save you a virtual visit to Amazon with a half-dozen while-you-stand-on-one-leg historical facts:
[1] Whether our Israelite ancestors arrived in Palestine, then known as Canaan, by Conquest or arose out of the then-present Canaanite population (archeologists differ), ancient Jewish Biblical history happened. A ninth century BCE enemy king’s stele, the Tel Dan stele, referencing “The House of David,” established that King David was real. Just this month, a Biblical Archeology Review article cites recent technological breakthroughs making fully visible previously only partially visible writing on a different enemy’s stele, the Mesha stele, as likewise most likely stating “House of David.” Solomon’s Temple, which stood for 400 years, was destroyed in the sixth century BCE, but archeologists are able to point in stone today just where on today’s Temple Mount its 500 cubit square platform had stood.
[2] On Judah’s final defeat by the Babylonian empire, not all were deported, and following Persians’ shortly following defeat of Babylon, many returned. The Second Temple was built and stood for 600 years. Its Mount is still there today, on which Muslims’ Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque today stand, not by random selection of site. Following Alexander’s defeat of the Persians, Jews under Maccabean leadership successfully revolted against his Seleucid successors, establishing the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom Judaea, which repeatedly revolted in the end unsuccessfully against Rome. It was homeland Jewish armies, not Arafat’s ancestors, who never ruled Palestine ever, that fought these foreign empires – Assyria and Babylonia, Seleucids and Rome.
[3] Between the Romans’ 135 CE final defeat of the Jews’ Bar Kochba revolt and today’s Israel’s independence in 1948, without exception every ruler of the land of Israel was a foreign empire invader – Romans-Byzantines; briefly Persians; Muslim Ommayad, Abbasid and Fatimid dynasties [the only time Arabs]; European Christian Crusaders; Kurdish Ayyubids; Turk-Circassian Mamluks; Ottoman Turks; British. Today’s Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.
[4] Historian Parkes (p. 266) was right that homeland Jews “who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement” had written today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.” Myriads were slain in the ferocious Great and Bar Kochba Revolts against Rome. Roman-Byzantine synagogue remains throughout the land, Tannaim and Amoraim scholars writing of the Mishnah and Palestinian (Jerusalem) Talmud, Roman recognition of the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jews until the fifth century, and 20,000 or more homeland Jews joining with the 614 Persian invaders, following which the reconquering Byzantines went on a Jew-massacring rampage, evidence that, contrary to widespread popular belief, the Romans did not exile the Jews.
[5] Archeologist Bahat constructed a ninth century map showing a hundred Abbasid period Jewish communities. The everyone-else especially Jew-slaughtering Crusaders acknowledged Jews as the last to fall confronting them at Jerusalem, and that Jews defended Haifa against them “courageously” for a month. From multiple sources I constructed a Mamluk era timeline of Jews’ presence in Jerusalem (among other homeland sites), including a 1491 Christian pilgrim’s notation of “not many Christians but many Jews” in Jerusalem who claim the Holy Land and “refuse to leave.” We have much evidence of the presence of Jews during Ottoman Turks’ 400 years of misrule, living in their holy cities of Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron, in Galilee farming villages and elsewhere in the land.
[6] Turk four-century misrule drove the land’s population down to its lowest of all recorded times, famously captured by Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad and by other observers. The WWI-defeated Turks were succeeded by the British-administered Palestine Mandate with its recognition of Jews’ historical connection with Palestine and reconstitution of the Jewish national home with close settlement of Jews on the land. 78% of the Mandate, all of the portion east of the Jordan River, became today’s Palestinian Arab-majority judenrein Jordan. The land of Israel’s, western Palestine’s, population in 1948 was about a million Arabs [that’s all] and over 600,000 Jews. So much for it being homogeneously Arab. And but for the Turks (with their expulsions), Germans (with their Holocaust), and British (with their before-during-and-after-the-Holocaust anti-Jewish Palestine blockade, following periods of royal, papal and other prohibitions of “transport of Jews to the East”), not to mention homeland Jews’ massacres by Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders and others (performing what Parkes rightly called “every discouragement”), there’d have been in 1948 Palestine a hell of a lot more Jews than that.
Summing Up
We’ve just witnessed (see our last week’s #1148) 100 countries criticizing Israel for redirecting funds from the Palestinian Authority to Israeli terrorism victims following UN General Assembly referral to what the UN’s treating as the International Kangaroo Court of request for an advisory opinion on
“Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”
and on Israel’s
“prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of Palestinian territory.”
Judea and Samaria and historic Jerusalem are not “Occupied Palestinian Territory” and homeland Jewish presence there is not “prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation.”
I know that a number of you Gentle Readers of my weekly epistles are enamored of “the two-state solution” and have qualms concerning pending Israeli judicial reform. What’s going on in the world today, evidenced by this travesty of the framing of a Palestinian Authority-instigated request for an ICJ advisory opinion, and a hundred countries’ letter to Israel criticizing it, is devastating international disrespect and delegitimization not only of Israel but Jews.
Historically – we’re not “settlers” – and legally (see Jay Sekulow’s book Jerusalem ably making these cases), the land of Israel is ours. (If you must support “two-states” [compare Trump’s peace plan, similar to Rabin’s vision of Palestinian internal autonomy in “less than a state”], do so from asserting we’re giving something up.) It is unthinkable that in the face of such disrespect and delegitimization of us, that we American Jews would render our support of our historic and legal homeland of Israel “conditional.” Stand with Israel on this – the land of Israel is ours.