WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: I’ve always been a bit squeamish about criticizing Israelis, protectors of our Jewish people’s national home, but it’s a pastime of my fellow non-Orthodox American Jews. So this week, ok, I’ll chime in as well.
From the Kibbitz Kibbutz: Chutzpah-Borne Advice to Our Homeland’s Fellow Jews
“If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.” What’s irked me most about American Jews gratuitously giving advice from afar to Israelis – e.g., not to press with “Judicial Reform,” not to amend the Law of Return, and to succumb to the ever-since-1967 world-championed “Two-State Solution” – is we don’t live in the less-than-friendly surroundings Israelis do. But there’s no sign of this kibbitzing letting up, so, what the Hell, I’ve decided this week to chime in myself. Ok, here goes, perhaps only a bit tongue-in-cheek:
[a] Law of Return is Exactly Backwards: It just doesn’t make any sense – that you can come there if you have just one Jewish grandparent. Exactly backwards. It looks to the past. What does it matter if eons ago your mother’s or father’s mother or father had been a Jew? Even John Kerry [grandparents nee ‘Kohn’] could come there. It should be the other way around. Look instead to the future – at least one of your grandkids has to be Jewish. That’s saying something that means something. One eminently deserving American likely to benefit by this switch would be Donald John Trump – author of the Abraham Accords (for which this week even U.S. Amb. Nides gave him complimentary credit), of an Israeli-Palestinian Arabs’ Peace Plan that might work, of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, of recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital (it’s taking the rest of the world 3,000 years) and of moving the American Embassy there. If he wins in 2024, he’ll be impeached over something or other, maybe twice, faster than you can say Nancy Pelosi. Israel could fix him up a nice place – a Mar-a-Lago On The Med. He’s earned it.
[b] Getting Americans To See Israel As a Regular Place: Too many Americans, alas many Jews, see Israel not as an indigenous people’s homeland like Italy, Ireland, India, Iran, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Iceland, etc., but as a “white colonial settler” European implant in an “Arab Mideast.” The irony is that the truth is the opposite – the biggest segment of Israel’s population is Mizrahi – Jews who never left the Mideast and North Africa, as indigenous thereto as Arabs. But Israel should show this indigenous face to the West and UN – in its diplomats and others who frequent there. And, e,g., how many American Blacks know what Israel has done, is doing today (with cultural change-shock problems it strives to solve) for Ethiopian Jews? But there’s a further thing Israel can do to bring home to grassroots Americans that Israel’s just a regular place with regular indigenous folks, like these other places I cited. Israel should sell Gold Star beer, which is pretty good stuff, in America. Americans like places that sell pretty good local beer.
[c] Show We’ve Been There for Three Millennia: If Iran or Hamas or Hezbollah could set Israel’s agenda where it should take visiting VIPs on their arrival in Israel, it would pick precisely where Israel picks – Yad Vashem, advertising for Israel’s enemies their misleading line – “ok, maybe a Holocaust did happen in Europe, so why should ‘the Palestinians’ suffer?” I don’t say, “Don’t take them to Yad Vashem.” By all means do so, get across that Israel really really means “Never Again!” in the Only Way to prevent it. But Israel should build on the ample grounds of that monumentally meaningful moving Holocaust [and centuries of persecution before that] memorial a museum vividly documenting ‘We Never Left,’ our Jewish people’s uninterrupted meaningful post-Biblical homeland presence in Palestine.
[d] Take Back the Jewish Homeland Equity in ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinian’: “Palestine” and “Palestinian” aren’t inherently Dirty Words. They were hijacked by those who’d rob us of our people’s three-millennia homeland heritage. The United Nations itself, in its 1947 Palestine partition resolution, called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.” But even we and Israelis talk today about whacking up the place called Palestine between Jews and “Palestinians.” Like “Pennsylvania” between Jews and “Pennsylvanians,” the sometimes-planet “Pluto” between Jews and “Plutonians.” So let’s all stop calling Palestinian Arabs “THE Palestinians.” It was the Romans who coined “Palestine” after defeating Jewish Judaea, not Arafat’s ancestors, to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews. Let’s take it back.
[e] And, While We’re At It, Let’s Stop Mouthing All the Enemy-Coined Dirty Words: The lexicon of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing Dirty Words, which we ourselves, homeland and Diaspora Jews, frequently mouth self-disrespectfully, fall into two groups – those coined to deny Jewish claim to the areas of our Jewish people’s homeland liberated by our homeland’s army in 1967, and those coined to denigrate our Jewish people’s right to our historic Land of Israel homeland per se.
The 1949 Israel-Jordan self-declared non-political-border ceasefire lines are not “Israel’s 1967 borders.” Homeland Jewish communities across them aren’t “Jewish settlements,” in pointed contradistinction to “Palestinian neighborhoods, towns, villages.” Homeland Jewish claim to the entirety of the remaining 22% of the post-Transjordan-excision Palestine Mandate Jewish national home is not “Israeli ultra-nationalists’ Greater Israel,” but is on the contrary a far Lesser Israel than that initially set forth in the Mandate. Historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, liberated, not “captured / seized in 1967” by Israel, as though there’d been no 3,000-year prior Jewish connection, aren’t a separate “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank.” They’re Ours, and we shouldn’t concede them as being “disputed” territories. Our people’s enemies, and the United Nations, don’t call them “disputed.” They call them “Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
Israel’s not “the Zionist entity.” Our Jewish homeland claim doesn’t date to “Israel’s creation and founding in 1948,” as though artificially and out-of-the-blue, or to the First Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897. It goes back through continuous presence for three thousand years. Zionism wasn’t something new, but an intensification of a Coming Home to the homeland that had gone on all through the centuries.
The 1948 multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction, in which Palestinian Arabs were fully involved, wasn’t “the war that followed Israel’s creation,” and the Palestinian Arab refugees of that Arab invasion-started-war, the majority of them induced by the Arab invaders to temporarily get out of their way, didn’t create a seemingly one-sided “Palestinian refugee issue.” More indigenously Middle-eastern Jews, mostly Israel-absorbed, were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands in the wake of that war than Arabs left tiny Israel.
The Temple Mount, where the Jews’ two Temples stood successively for a thousand years, is still the Temple Mount, and not exclusively Haram-al-Sharif, for all the UN today calls it that, to stick it to Israel, as the US delegate to the current resolutions’ drafting committee forthrightly stated. And Rachel’s Tomb is still Rachel’s Tomb, not “Rachel’s Mosque,” and the Hebron Cave of the [Jewish] Patriarchs isn’t “a West Bank heritage site.”
Summing Up
Ok, I typically direct these weekly harangues of mine at my fellow grassroots American Jews. If it’s chutzpah for us to tell Israelis, who are literally on the firing line, once a Purim to clean up their act, they themselves should have a little rachmones for those of us, who sometimes see ourselves as, well, a little more Catholic than the Pope.