WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: We American Jews live in a momentous time in our people’s long history that has seen the great struggle for our people’s homeland’s sovereign rebirth. Some moments in this struggle have called for more active support from us than others. Now is such a moment.
If You Could Have Picked Your Jewish History Time & Place – In Defense of Here & Now
On a whim one week a few years back, I asked You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly when and where would you have chosen to live in Jewish history, had you had the option. Would you have joined Abraham in heeding God’s call to uproot himself and seek the land that He would show him? Would you have stood with Moses at Sinai? Crossed the Jordan with Joshua? Entered Jerusalem with David? Stood with Solomon at the Temple’s dedication? Wrested back Jewish homeland independence with Maccabees from Alexander’s Seleucid successors ….? I got only one vote (mine) for the final choice on my list – Here and Now. So let me defend it.
My choice of the key time and place to be a grassroots Jew is for a moment when we have a clear grasp of where we are and how we got there, and is a most meaningful moment when a seminal Jewish destiny decision hangs in the balance and we grassroots Jews so inclined can individually and hence collectively influence the outcome.
One doesn’t necessarily have to believe in miracles to appreciate where our Jewish people stands today, but it helps. Charles Krauthammer, 3/14/16: “… the Jewish people are living through a miraculous age: the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty.” And that sovereign rebirth occurred but three years after the culmination of close to two millennia maltreatment of our mostly exiled people in Europe. The Holocaust was no anomaly. Over the centuries, every device of ethnic cleansing – Pale of Settlement, Ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, Pogrom – was devised in enlightened Europe, Christendom’s heartland, specifically for us Jews. And not that we’d fared historically freer as “dhimmis” in Muslim lands.
And that that rebirth of Jewish sovereignty came in the land of Israel was not happenstance. It’s our homeland, “the birthplace of the Jewish people” where our “spiritual, religious and national identity was formed,” where we “achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance . . . wrote and gave the Bible to the world,” where some of us always remained and the rest of us prayed and some acted through two millennia to return. Our sense of homeland has always been place specific, Israel specific. It would not play in Uganda.
Many Westerners, among them Jews, mistakenly believe “the Western Wall is the sole surviving remnant of Herod’s Temple Mount.” That prayer area is actually a small section of a hugely bigger western wall, extending north and south, and the seven Herodian courses one sees sit atop seventeen more Herodian courses below today’s ground, visible in a now-lighted surviving Warren-sunk shaft. Substantial segments of Herod’s Mount’s southern and eastern walls still stand. Elder of Ziyon (blog post 5/16/23) states their historical Jewish presence significance:
“… the entire Temple Mount was built by Jews, in sections, from the time of the Biblical kings to the Hasmonean extensions to the Herodian extensions. These extensions can be seen from the Eastern Wall of the Mount.
“The entire Temple Mount is proof of the Temples!”
As archeological architect Leen Ritmeyer (The Quest and Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount) has through extant evidence shown, that Temple proof extends down to the still visible slot in the Foundation Stone, today centered under the Dome of the Rock, where the Ark of the Covenant rested in Solomon’s Temple’s Holy of Holies.
Climb Masada by the Dead Sea and look down on the remains of the rectangular camp of the Jerusalem survivors’ Roman besiegers and of the ramp the Romans built to the summit.
Historian Parkes was right that the homeland Jews who remained, “in spite of every discouragement,” through the long post-biblical foreign rule centuries wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.” Realization of fulfillment of the Dream of Generations for the homeland’s sovereign rebirth began long before the Holocaust and before the Balfour Declaration, but was stayed incomplete by the UN-imposed ceasefire terminating Israel’s War of Independence. Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem were liberated (not “occupied”) in 1967, but the world today – UNSC 2334 and, this week, Australia, Jerusalem Post, 8/8/23, Australia will [again] refer to West Bank as ‘occupied Palestinian territories’ – says, in 2334’s words, that they “will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 [i.e., 1949 ceasefire] lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations….’”
On the brighter side, and a locus of hope, are “the Abraham Accords.” Their most significant breakthrough, by me, is their name, “Abraham Accords,” a beginning of Arab recognition that Israel, the largest population segment of which is Mizrahi (Middle-eastern, North African), is indigenous to the region all the way back and not a post-Holocaust European implant.
The US government today is involved in talks regarding possible Israel-Arabia diplomatic relations, a consummation, as Shakespeare would put it, devoutly to be wished. But, by me, not at the cost of ripping away from sovereign Israel historic Jerusalem and defensible Judea-Samaria biblical hill country heartland.
My fear is that the Biden administration will be the driver of including in drafting any such Arabia-Israel agreement the, by me suicidal for the Jewish homeland, “two-state solution.” Quoting a devil’s disciple, in this case the NY Times’ Thomas Friedman, for prophet, 7/28/23, Tom Friedman: Biden, Not the Saudis, Conditions Israel-Saudi Reproachment on 2-State Solution, this fear is not fanciful, even realistically groundless.
And at this moment, this is why Here and Now is a key moment for American Jews to assert themselves unconditionally in support of our people’s homeland. But it’s not just this particular threat at this particular moment that American Jews have needed to counter. Peter Bergson, in the days of the Holocaust and then homeland struggle against the British then Arabs, was less than successful. US UN Representative Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at the moment of voting on the UN’s “Zionism Is Racism” resolution, turned to Israel’s Representative Chaim Herzog and confronted him, “Where are your ******* Jews!?”
Israel is the world’s only nation state on the permanent condemnation calendar of the UN. The EU, media and this week even Australia – how much further away can you get? – act against it. However one interprets the civil discord now occurring in Israel (my cynical view is the left sees eliminating the Court’s unique-in-the-world “reasonableness” standard as further weakening its long-diminishing power), the discord is real, but it’s internal to Israel. American Jews need to put it aside and unequivocally stand with most Israelis that historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David, etc.) and Judea-Samaria (not “the West Bank”) are integral parts of our people’s historic Jewish homeland. This is our role, Here and Now.