WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: We’re deeply, even acrimoniously, divided on judicial reform and the two-state solution. Yet we agree, I believe, that our Jewish people has a just historical and legal homeland claim to the land of Israel, including, whether we’d compromise it or not, historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, and that Israel is not “an apartheid settler colonial state.” We need actively to assert these agreed fundamental facts to ourselves and to others, which will cool, at least, the tone of our internal debate and enhance others’ assessment of our people’s historically, legally and morally just homeland claim.
Can We Agree At Least: Historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria are Embraced in Our People’s Homeland Claim, and Israel is Not an “Apartheid Colonial State”?
We grassroots American Jews differ deeply and with some animosity on judicial reform, the two-state solution and other issues roiling Israel’s and our own communities, but, I believe, there are fundamental facts regarding our people’s homeland, the land of Israel, on which the vast bulk of Jews agree. Particularly in times like these of emotionally-charged left-right division in our community, we need to state our fundamental agreements out loud, to ourselves, to political and communal leaders in the U.S. and Israel, and to those who disdain all of us (e.g., the Congressional boycotters of very liberal Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s recent speech).
See if you can agree with my statements below of two Jewish people’s homeland fundamental facts. If we can together make clear our homeland case, we’ll have given reachable people in the world firmer grounds to reject canards that Israel’s a “colonial … occupier … apartheid” etc. pariah deserving of its current status of uniquely singled-out permanent-condemnation-agenda target in the UN. And we’ll ameliorate some of the internal animosities in our community.
[1] Irrespective of our individual stands on “the two-state solution” as a peace basis between Jews and Arabs, our Jewish people’s historical and legal claim to the land of Israel does not stop at the 1949 ceasefire lines, but includes Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem.
If, unlike me, you believe in the two-state solution, make the concession of Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem mean something. The world today is on record that we have no claim to these areas, hence that they count for nothing in give-and-take negotiations, which thus begin and not end there. The world, UNSC 2334, says
“… 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 ….” [emphasis added]
Even if you’d give them up in a peace settlement, vigorously assert that historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all) and our people’s homeland’s defensible Judea-Samaria biblical hill country heartland are not “Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.” They were never Palestinian Arab-ruled territory, and were foreign Arab empire-ruled territory only between 638 and 1099. What the world today anti-Jewishly calls “East” Jerusalem is the historic city, not some satellite spur. It has been the capital now of three native Jewish states – biblical Judah, Hasmonean (Maccabean) Judaea, and today’s Israel – and nobody else’s capital in the past three thousand years. Today’s Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Judaea, every ruler in between having been a foreign empire invader.
Jews have lived in this historic Jerusalem since c. 1000 BCE. Yes, foreign conquerors at times banned them from the city, starting with the Romans in 70 CE, but they relentlessly returned whenever they could and throughout those millennia until the Arab invasion in 1948 nobody called Jews in Jerusalem “settlers” or the heart of Jerusalem “East.” And Jerusalem has had a renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman Turkish rule. The League of Nations Palestine Mandate, endorsed by its successor UN, recognized the Jewish people’s historic connection with Palestine and a Jewish national home west of the River. The Arab-rejected 1947 UN Palestine partition plan referenced Samaria and Judea as “Samaria and Judea,” not “the West Bank,” and called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs, not “Jewish settlers and Palestinians” but “the two Palestinian peoples.”
The now long-gone 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines were expressly declared in their defining document not to constitute political borders. Obliterated by renewed fighting, again initiated by Jordan, in 1967, and superseded by that 1967 war’s Jordan River ceasefire lines, those old defunct 1949 lines, the United Nations to the contrary notwithstanding, are not among the Holy Land’s holy places.
[2] Israel’s population is majority indigenously Middle-eastern (Mizrahi, from North Africa and Middle East), blending with Ashkenazi and Sephardi into “Israeli,” and Israel is not “an apartheid European colonial settler state.”
We make mistakes, I think, in talking ourselves about an eighteen hundred year “exile” and return, rather than emphasizing as did historian Parkes (see, e.g., Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, Amazon) that continuous post-biblical presence of tenaciously remaining homeland Jews, even long as a minority, wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds,” and in acquiescing in Jews living today beyond the old 1949 ceasefire lines being as-if-strangers-to-the-land “settlers.” But be that as it may, in the wake of the war begun by that 1948 Arab invasion, more Israel-absorbed indigenously Middle-eastern Jews were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel. Today’s Israeli population’s largest segment is Mizrahi (North African and Middle-eastern), and through marriage in which Mizrahi, Sephardi or Ashkenazi ancestry is irrelevant is blending into “Israeli.” In both diplomatic and public international interfaces, Israel should present a more Mizrahi face to the world, and Diaspora Jews should assert this opposite-of-apartheid reality.
Some segments of America’s Black community claim Israel is “racist” toward “the Palestinians.” There’s a two-part answer to this. One is the extraordinary lengths to which Israel has gone to include in its Ingathering of the Exiles the authentically Jewish, permanently persecuted in Ethiopia for being Jewish, Black Ethiopian Jews. Yes, their sudden millennia-spanning adjustment has had problems, but it has worked and flies in the face of “apartheid.”
The second part of the answer to “apartheid” relates to Palestinian Arabs. Beyond that fewer Arabs left Israel than Middle-eastern land Jews, long mistreated as “dhimmi,” came there, Palestinian Arabs are the majority population of Jordan, sitting on 78% of the Palestine Mandate, so they have a Palestine homeland, judenrein at that, so those Arabs who aren’t Israeli citizens (some of whom hold high governmental and commercial positions) aren’t homeland-less people. Compare how Jews fared for close to two millennia in Christian Europe and Muslim Mideast.
Bottom Line
Ok, we American Jews are deeply even acrimoniously divided on judicial reform, the two-state solution and other issues likewise dividing Israelis. But I think that most of us agree that our people has a valid and just homeland claim to the land of Israel, including historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, and that Israel is not “an apartheid settler colonial state.” Let us loudly emphasize our unity on that both to ourselves and to others, to the benefit of both our internal cohesion and others’ assessment of the historical, legal and moral validity of our people’s land of Israel homeland claim.