WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The Inq’s Trudy Rubin had a long column last weekend castigating Israel and championing “the two-state solution.” We have to stand up for our historical and legal right to our Jewish people’s indivisible homeland.
More This Week From Those Wonderful Westerners Who Wrote that Jews Ascending the Temple Mount Where Solomon and Jesus Had Walked Had “Visited the Mosque, the Third Holiest Site in Islam”
Ms. Rubin’s Pitch For “Two-States”
My son Jon and I shared a delightful dinner last night down in Philly’s Chinatown [fn 1] with a longtime Philadelphia daily newspaper Jewish journalist. For decades he wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News, the sports coverage-oriented tabloid sister of the Philadelphia Inquirer (“Inq”). It was with the Inq’s Israel coverage that for years these weekly emails of mine took issue more often than not. But I do recall a Daily News run-in as well. One day it devoted its cover to surveying support for Israel among Green Bay Packer fans. I emailed that more to its shtick would’ve been surveying support for the Green Bay Packers among Israeli fans.
Our dinner conversation included our takes on Inq World Affairs Columnist Trudy Rubin’s Inq column last Sunday, One-State, Two-State, No State? In its online format, Ms. Rubin’s column with photos etc. goes on for 29 pages. Where she and I differ most deeply centers upon her statement near the beginning of her article where, after taking a brief introductory swing at “the most right-wing government in Israel’s history” being out “to gut the powers of the Supreme Court and eliminate the country’s system of checks and balances,” she goes on:
“An equally scary threat to Israel’s democracy is the current government’s push to irreversibly annex the West Bank to Israel, creating one Israeli state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”
Indeed, unlike Ms. Rubin, who concludes her column that she agrees “in principle about the continuing need for a two-state solution,” I do view the entirety of western Palestine, “from the River to the Sea” [sound familiar?], as a single indivisible national entity. There are no natural geographical boundaries west of the Jordan Valley and Judea-Samaria highland ridge backing it, least of all the 1949 military-only ceasefire lines snaking through the country, including through the heart of Jerusalem. Being nine miles wide in the lowland middle would be suicidal for Israel.
But apart from security necessity, our historic land of Israel, Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria inherently included, has never been ruled ever by Palestinian Arabs, and only between 638 and 1099 by foreign Arab dynasties. But it has been the place of our Jerusalem-capital biblical Jewish kingdoms and Hasmonean kingdom, which we never fully left, and today’s Jewish Israel is the land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea. The land of Israel is our historic homeland, our Jewish people’s national home, as the Palestine Mandate expressed it. We do not need to “annex” any part of it, as Ms. Rubin contends, because by law and history it is intrinsically ours, and “to annex,” per the Cambridge English dictionary (right-click “annex” in Word 2021) means “to take possession of an area of land or a country, usually by force or without permission.”
Nor, unlike Ms. Rubin, do I call Judea and Samaria “the West Bank,” a name coined in 1950 by the invader Transjordan to disassociate these parts of the Jewish homeland, with their Hebrew origin names that had been in use for three millennia, from the Jews. (Cf the Romans having renamed Judaea as Palestine.) Ms. Rubin in her article dismisses the names “Judea” and “Samaria” as “the religious terms for the southern and northern regions of the West Bank.” Was the United Nations indulging in Jewish religious terms, or in millennia-used secular historical terms, when it wrote “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River” in its Palestine partition resolution of 1947?
Beyond not being a “scary threat to Israel’s democracy,” the Jewish claim to the entirety of western Palestine, the historic land of Israel, does not deprive Palestinian Arabs of a homeland of their own, in Palestine. The post-Ottoman Empire League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate, endorsed by its successor UN, literally partitioned Eastern from Western Palestine along the Jordan River, authorizing the Mandate’s trustee, Britain, to create an all-Arab Transjordan, today’s Jordan, on the 78% east of the River, which Britain with alacrity did. Palestinian Arabs are the majority population of Jordan, ok ruled by a Hashemite king, but he might be constituted a constitutional monarch like Charles, rendering Jordan, to whatever extent it is not already, “Democratic & Arab.”
Yes, it’s true many of Jordan’s Palestinian Arab majority citizens are descended from Arabs who left Israel in the war started by the 1948 Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction, but the biggest segment of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, descended from the greater number of indigenously Middle-eastern Jews displaced from Arab and other Muslim lands in North Africa and the Mideast in the wake of that war begun by that Arab invasion.
Beyond our differences on the substantive merits versus perils of “the two-state solution,” I object, of course, to Ms. Rubin’s contrast throughout her column of “Palestinians” in a “West Bank Palestinian town” versus “Israeli setters” in “Israeli settlements,” and with her demonization of needed judicial reform as “an unprecedented threat to Israel’s democracy” that’s “keen to see the Supreme Court neutered,” and the protests against it as “ongoing pro-democracy demonstrations.” This gratuitous attempted tarnishing of Israel tarnishes Ms. Rubin’s article’s argument’s integrity.
But If Not “Two-States” Then What?
The Trump less-than-a-state peace plan, sidelined by the Abraham Accords, offered one. See Amb. David Friedman’s book Sledgehammer.
Before that was PM Rabin’s similar four-principle plan, in a Knesset speech a month before he was killed, summarized in a Caroline Glick-carried Breitbart interview of retired Gen. Gershon Hacohen, Without Judea and Samaria, Israel Cannot Defend Tel Aviv (1/24/19).
Rabin’s four principles were that Israel must remain a Jewish state with a large Jewish majority; that an expanded Jerusalem must remain under solid Israeli sovereignty [fn 2]; that Israel control the Jordan Valley in perpetuity; and that an internal rule Palestinian Authority would be less than a state, excluding control of the electronic spectrum and airspace, and wouldn’t have an army.
A less-than-a-state entity for Palestinian Arabs resident in Israel, in addition to their majority citizenship in eastern Palestine, Jordan, and de facto exclusive Palestinian Arab entity in Gaza, is not an inequitable solution for them, while preserving a viable national homeland for Jews. In the long-term future, Mizrahi-majority Israel might come to be seen, to both sides’ benefit, by its Arab state neighbors as the indigenous Middle-eastern people’s state that it is, with monotheistic roots preceding Islam, which honors some of its biblical prophets and leaders, by longer than a millennium.
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Footnotes:
[1] It turns out that rail commuting from Elkins Park to Philadelphia is no longer as simple and straight-forward as the last time I did it. Ok, we “Seniors” ride these days for free, but when I got off at what had been “the Reading Terminal” the last time I got off there, I couldn’t get out of Jefferson Station.
No longer can you just show your unexpired driver’s license to the conductor on the train if asked for a ticket. Driver’s licenses no longer suffice. The train conductor just ignores, no longer accosts you. When you get off now at Jefferson Station, you have to insert your pre-Senior ticket or “SEPTA Key Senior [Free] Fare Card” into a turnstile. Having neither, I filed a habeas corpus with the nearest uniformed SEPTA representative, who led me to an “Exit Ticket” machine (that cost me six bucks) and handed me an “Attention Senior Customers” card announcing that “Beginning November 1, 2022, the SEPTA Key Senior [Free] Fare Card will be the ONLY [emphasis SEPTA’s] card valid to travel on SEPTA.” You can get it, “Appointment Required” [really], at “SEPTA Headquarters,” or visit “your participating Pennsylvania Senate and State Representative offices” and “please expect 3 weeks for delivery” via mail.
But gazing at my Exit Machine-issued Exit Ticket, I then asked SEPTA’s helpful esteemed representative, so after having dinner tonight in Chinatown Philadelphia, how will I get back into Jefferson Station? He led me to an Entrance Ticket window, where I forked over an additional $5.25, good until midnight.
Ok, so I’m what President Biden calls one of those dastardly Democracy-destroying “MAGA Republicans,” and I’m ardently for Voter ID and all that, but having to go through all this just to get this “SEPTA Key Senior [Free] Fare Card,” not to Vote in a Presidential Election but just to get to a Chinese restaurant (and back) in downtown Philadelphia, is Age Discrimination.
So here’s my MAGA Republican plea to Texas Governor Abbott: Stop with this busing of illegal immigrants inundating “Sanctuary City” Philadelphia. Send them on up ticketless by train. Talk about Charlie on the MTA, they’ll never get out of the station.
[2] Christians as well as Jews have a stake in Israeli control of Jerusalem. A fortnight ago in #1168 I quoted Palestinian Media Watch quoting a Palestinian Arab Abbas spokesperson recently calling Christians’ holiest Jerusalem holy site “Palestinian”:
“The Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al-Aqsa Mosque are among the foundational pillars of history, and they are Palestinian holy places, and not Jewish holy places. There is no historical proof – despite all the excavations – that [the Jews] had any kind of presence in this land.”
Israeli archeologist Meir Ben-Dov, in his In the Shadow of the Temple: The Discovery of Ancient Jerusalem (pp. 112-113), tells of an incident in the post-Six Day War excavations just south of the Temple Mount, which he was directing, to which many Muslim authorities objected. The archeologists were uncovering the broad set of steps leading up to the Mount’s southern wall Double Gates. An incident occurred revealing the significance of this excavation to Christians:
“The patriarch of the Ethiopian Church happened to visit the dig soon after we had uncovered these steps. ‘Is it possible that Jesus and the Apostles walked up these steps?’ he asked. ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ I told him. ‘This is the main staircase that led to the Temple Mount, and it was the only one used by pilgrims bound for the Temple.’ Upon hearing my answer, a wave of emotion swept over the patriarch and his retinue, and we paused so that they could offer up prayers on the spot.”