WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Political periodicals periodically look back at significant happenings in their interest-realm over a selected time frame. Most do so at year-end for that past year. Here’s a gray-haired conservative grassroots American Jew’s longer look back at U.S.-Israel relations seen from a personal mile marker.
US & Israel: A Millstone Birthday Celebrant Looks Back Over a Lifetime
A periodical that makes it through a swing or two of the Earth ‘round the Sun can annually look back and highlight significant things it observed. This Brith Sholom Media Watch (BSMW) has made it around a few times (twenty-two and counting), so the issue here is when’s the right day of the year for it to pause and do this observing.
Most periodicals pick as this Pause-and-Reflect date New Year’s Day, some Jewish ones Rosh Hashonah, but BSMW’s Editorial Board, by a unanimous vote of 1-0, selected My Birthday, which I observed this past week. (Decades ago, I had three tests I hadn’t yet reached Middle Age – I was on a softball team, I didn’t wear bifocals, and so far as I knew I wasn’t a grandfather. Ok, I’m six feet tall and both my grandsons are taller than me. I’ve learned that once you’ve reached that biblical four score years, every birthday from then on is a progressively Millstone Observance. If your mind forgets, your legs will remind you.) So ok, here’s what I’ve seen on a subject relevant to all us American Jews – relations between Israel and the U.S.
America During WWII and the Holocaust
I was a little kid living in America during WWII and the Holocaust. I don’t ask you to read a thick book about the Allies’, including America’s, Abandonment of The Jews, but I would have you read chapter 20 of acclaimed Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk’s moving biography, Commander of the Exodus, of Yossi Harel. In the course of a few pages (153-159) he ably sums up:
* As late as 1938 the Germans were trying to expel Jews, but “with the strong support of the Americans, the British put pressure on the European countries, even threatening them, not to allow the Jews sent by Eichmann to enter their borders.”
* “A State Department document openly states that if numerous Jews were rescued, it would not be possible to solve the problem of placing them after the war…. Such statements were open to only one possible interpretation: the two great democracies, the United States and Great Britain, were, in the words of an official of the American Treasury Department, ‘deeply committed not to save the Jews.’”
* “Conferences like the one in Bermuda were convened with the goal of killing time and prolonging inaction…. The Anglo-American commitment not to save the Jews turned into an active campaign and was conducted with the clear knowledge that it had sympathizers.”
* While the Allies parachuted food to non-Jewish Poles, they would not do that for Jews starving to death in ghettos, because “the American government claimed that such an act would violate the order prohibiting any aid whatsoever to enemy citizens.”
* In the summer of 1944, “when the British, American, and Russian governments already knew full well what was going on,” the Americans and British still refused to bomb the death camp gas installations, or the railroad tracks and rail bridges leading to the camps, claiming the sites were too far from the Allied bombers’ bases in England. After the war it became clear that Europe-based Allied bombers “flew over Auschwitz and attacked the refineries and manufacturing factories near and inside the area of Auschwitz.”
* In 1943-44, “the Allies put pressure on neutral governments not to accept Jews into their borders, claiming that they were enemy subjects and this would alter their status of neutrality.”
America During and Following Israel’s Rebirth
Ok, President Truman, a product of his times, wasn’t particularly fond of us Jews, but there was one he liked, his old business partner and war buddy, Eddie Jacobson, and one he respected, Chaim Weizmann. When Truman’s State Department acted the next day contrary what he’d just told Weizmann and Truman reputedly lamented “The old doctor will think I’m a liar,” I believe that he meant it. And yes he did push partition and recognized Israel in fifteen minutes, but embargoed arms “to the Mideast,” with the British et ilk arming the Arabs, Some American Jews sent “farm machinery” to Palestine, the fraternal order Brith Sholom, in whose name I put out these weekly emailed epistles, honorably among them. Was the U.S. serious about embargoing arms to the Jews? Read Leonard Slater’s quite moving book, The Pledge, and you’ll see. And did that embargo against arms to Israel go on? Until President Kennedy, it did.
During Recent U.S. Administrations
Early in his administration, June 2009, President Obama addressed the whole world from Cairo. Among what he said:
“… America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald….”
“…. It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding….”
Give President Obama at least this – that he appreciated that the Holocaust was not an anomaly but a culmination of anti-Semitism in Europe that had gone on for centuries. But Israel did not come back into sovereign independence because of the Holocaust, but as the natural fruition into statehood of a homeland physical presence as well as spiritual connection of a people, the Jewish people, to a place, the land of Israel, that had continued all through the exclusively foreign empire rule centuries between Judaea’s final defeat by Rome until today’s Israel’s independence as that land’s next native state. As Herzl put it, “If you will it, it is no dream.”
Nor were Palestinian Arabs displaced, as President Obama put it, “by Israel’s founding.” They joined in the partition-rejecting multi-nation 1948 Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction, that was thrown back and then some by Israel’s homeland army of homeland Jews. Most of those Arabs who left tiny Israel were induced by the invading Arab armies to temporarily get out of their way. And they were exceeded in number by Israel-absorbed indigenously Middle-eastern Jewish refugees displaced in that war’s wake from vast Arab and other Muslim lands.
But if what President Obama said on his entry onto the world stage was troubling to the world’s Jews, it was exceeded by U.S. abstention, and likely instigation, on UNSC 2334 on his post-election way out the door. The U.N. Security Council declared
“’that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-state solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace ….
“’that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem . . . .
“’that it [UNSC] will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations. . . .’”
And now we have the drive by Messrs. Biden, Blinken & Nides, along with the United Nations and most of the rest of the world, for “two-states along the 1967 [1949] lines with mutually agreed land swaps,” which the merest glance at a western Palestine map, especially a 3-D one, shows an Israel which would be militarily indefensible and Jewishly heartless.
A Possibly Workable Alternative Peace Plan?
Exists there a mutually livable middle-ground between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs? A plan has been conceived by a then-American official that would grant Palestinian Arabs internal autonomy [in addition to being the majority population of a nation, Jordan, sitting on 78% of the Palestine Mandate] in a specified portion of Judea-Samaria, with room to expand beyond where they live now, but Israel will retain security control over the entirety of the land, with Jerusalem as its capital, and can apply sovereignty over the remainder of Judea-Samaria, including the security-critical Jordan Valley and highland ridge. The Palestinian Authority would have four years to accept this plan, during which Jewish communities would not be established in that specified Arab autonomy area.
The plan’s not dissimilar to Gen. Rabin’s final vision of a Palestinian Arab autonomous area that’s “less than a state.” That plan’s promulgating then-American official was then-U.S. President Donald Trump, and Israeli leaders who endorsed it in principle included then PM Netanyahu and his then election opponent Benny Ganz. What pushed it from the limelight was the even-more-meaningful Abraham Accords bringing regional peace closer between Israel and Arabs. If America and the world can get past “two-states,” it might work. (For details, see Trump’s Ambassador to Israel David Friedman’s book Sledgehammer: How Breaking With the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East.) Willy nilly, Israel can’t take America forever for granted, and, two-states, shmoo-states, must maintain Jewishly meaningful secure as well as recognized borders.