WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: It’s Guterres’ depiction of Israel, not of Hamas, that’s the most delegitimizing canard in what he said. Many good people in the West sincerely believe “the Palestinians” are suffering what he called Israel’s “suffocating occupation.” We have to do better in disabusing reachable people of that.
Jews’ Wrath Misses the Most Delegitimizing Canard in UN Sec. Gen’s “Not in a Vacuum” Speech
Try to read not in a rage, as President Biden would caution us, the four infuriating sentences in UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ notorious speech:
“It is important also to recognize the attack by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their lands steadily devoured by settlement and plagued by violence, their economies stifled, their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”
From Israeli President Herzog – INN, 10/25/23, Herzog Responds to UN Chief: There is No Reason or Justification for Terror, to the Geller Report, 10/24/23, UN Secretary General Defends Hamas Atrocities, Endorses Genocide, Blames Israel, we Jews have lambasted what we see, as INN’s headline put it, as “justification for terror.”
As INN itself headlined, 10/25/23, Guterres responded, Guterres: My ‘Vacuum’ Remarks were Misinterpreted, I Condemned Hamas. That article quoted him:
“Guterres said: ‘I am shocked by the misrepresentations by some of my statement yesterday in the Security Council – as if I was justifying acts of terror by Hamas. This is false. It was the opposite. In the beginning of my intervention yesterday, I clearly stated, and I quote: “I have condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October act of terror by Hamas in Israel. Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring, and kidnapping of civilians, or the launching of rockets against civilian targets,” end quote.’”
Go back and re-read those four UN Secretary General’s “did not happen in a vacuum” sentences I quoted at the beginning. The most delegitimizing canard is the utterly false viciously anti-Jewish homeland depiction of western Palestine, the land of Israel, filling those sentences.
“The Palestinian people” have not been “subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation” – i.e., since the 1967 Six Day War, when the Arabs, including “the Palestinians” fighting in organized ranks in Sinai and Arab-ruled Gaza, launched the second of their three all-out wars to destroy Israel. As Nasser put it on the eve of that 1967 war, “Our basic aim is the destruction of Israel.”
“The Palestinian people” are the majority population of Jordan, sitting on 78% of the Palestine Mandate. That’s a fact, whether you believe that this constitutes “the two-state solution” or not. Yes, many of them are the descendants of Arabs displaced from western Palestine in the first of the three all-out Arab wars for Israel’s destruction. But in the wake of that Arab invasion-begun 1948 war in which Palestinian Arabs fully participated, more Israel-absorbed indigenously Middle-eastern Jews were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel, and their descendants constitute the largest demographic-source stream of Israelis today. We have to argue vociferously that Palestinian Arabs are not “THE Palestinians,” that Palestinian Jews are Palestinian too. Secretary General Guterres’ United Nations itself said so in referring to Palestine’s Jews and Arabs in its 1947 Palestine partition resolution as “the two Palestinian peoples.”
No part of the land of Israel, none, is “occupied Palestinian territory” – not Jerusalem, not Judea-Samaria, not All of it, as in “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” It’s not theirs, it’s not “disputed,” it’s Ours. We must unequivocally vociferously say so.
Historically and legally the Jewish people has a stronger case for the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan River, than do Palestinian Arabs, who’ve never ruled Palestine ever. (And unlike these “suffocated” Palestinian Arabs, we have no other part of Palestine like Jordan – or for that matter any place else in the world, like a score or so other Arab states – that’s majority inhabited by our own people speaking our own language and adhering to our own religion to which we could go and call home. It’s us that’s suffocated, if anyone is.)
The Jewish people as Jews – e.g., two Jewish temples that stood successively in our capital, Jerusalem, for a thousand years, the Mount of which is still substantially there – lived in our homeland as its indigenous people. Where were “THE Palestinians” when Jews were defending it against Assyrians, Babylonians, Alexander’s Seleucid successors and Rome? And which the Romans renamed from Judaea to Palestine, not after Arafat’s ancestors but the long-gone Sea People Philistines – to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews.
Jimmy Carter et al to the contrary notwithstanding, the Jewish people was not exiled from the land of Israel in 135 CE by Rome. We remained for a couple centuries at least as the land’s majority people, and thereafter as a tenacious homeland-claiming minority that never fully left. Today’s Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, every ruler in between having been a foreign empire invader (and except between 638 and 1099 non-Arab at that). Historian Parkes assessed that this tenacious post-biblical homeland Jewish presence wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.” I wrote a book tracing it, Israel 3000 Years.
The League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate, endorsed by its successor UN, recognized Palestine as “the Jewish national home,” with a proviso allowing the Trustee, Britain, to withhold therefrom [only] the 78% east of River, which Britain with alacrity did as all-Arab Transjordan. Other Mandates apportioned the rest of the Mideast to Arabs. And that apportionment in the Palestine Mandate itself between Jewish national home Israel and Arab Jordan constituted the partition of Palestine between Jews and Arabs. And the Trump plan offered Palestinian Arabs living today west of the River also internal autonomy in a larger area of Judea-Samaria than where they mainly live now.
All of us have been shocked by the pogrom-dismissing antagonism toward Israel evinced in western countries, including the US, especially among the young not only on college campuses. Not all these people are anti-Semites. They, and many who’ve not been part of these protests, believe that Arabs have a stronger claim to the land of Israel, at least east of the snaking-through-Israel, Jerusalem-excluding suicidal-for-Israel 1949 ceasefire lines, than Jews. Israelis and we Diaspora Jews, not least us grassroots in the US and our “communal leaders,” have to do better, starting right now, in making our case.