WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The Washington rally was great, but not enough, as Tobin says. Here’s how we grassroots US Jews can further the cause.
“The ‘Occupation’ Lie, an Excuse for Massacring Jews”
“The ‘Occupation’ Lie, an Excuse for Massacring Jews.” That’s the title of an INN article Friday, by activist Diane Bederman. Her subtitle: “It’s essential to Israel’s existence that she debunk the Occupation Lie: Declare San Remo Day, Yom San Remo.”
How right she is! Here’s a half-dozen fairly influential folks – Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, former US President Barack Obama, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, the Associated Press, and the United Nations Security Council – sounding off (emphasis added, a little) on Israel, as the UNSC on behalf of the world calmly puts it, “establishing settlements” of “no legal validity” in “the Palestinian territory,” thereby constituting a “flagrant violation under international law,” a “major obstacle to achievement of the two-State solution,” and to a “just, lasting and comprehensive peace.” To wit:
“May there be a curse upon the OCCUPATION ….” Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, quoted in INN, 11/15/23, Palestinian Authority Chief: May There Be a Curse Upon the Occupation
“… the OCCUPATION and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable ….” Former US President Barack Obama, quoted in Victor David Hanson, INN, 11/10/23, The Incredible Lightness of Barack Obama
“… the violations of international law by the Israeli OCCUPATION authorities ….” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman [“MBS”] during African-Saudi summit in Saudi capital, quoted in Jerusalem Post, 11/10/23, Saudi Crown Prince, African Leaders Call for End to War in Gaza
“The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating OCCUPATION.” United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, quoted in INN, 10/25/23, Guterres: My ‘Vacuum’ Remarks Were Misrepresented, I condemned Hamas
“… the situation in the OCCUPIED West Bank since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war nearly three weeks ago, after a brutal rampage by Hamas gunmen from Gaza ….” Associated Press [“AP”], 10/26/23, Palestinian Activist is Expelled by Israeli Forces From His Home in a Volatile West Bank City
“… 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.” United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, 2016, inspired by Obama administration on way out the door.
Where’s all this heading? See, e.g., the US Secretary of State and State Dept. stating clearly (JNS, 11/8/23, US Wants Gaza Under Palestinian Authority):
“Blinken, meeting with P.A. chief Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on Sunday, said the U.S. is committed ‘to working toward the realization of the Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations for the establishment of a Palestinian state.’
“The State Department tweeted on Nov. 4 that it views the two-state solution as ‘the only viable path.’”
Ms. Bederman rightly cites in her article the charters of both the PLO, founded to “liberate” Palestine three years before 1949-ceasefire-lines Israel possessed these “flagrantly international law violating, two-state solution and just, lasting and comprehensive peace majorly blocking Occupied Palestinian Territories (including East Jerusalem),” and of Hamas, both loudly calling for Israel’s total extinction. As the saying goes, “From the River to the Sea ….” To Palestinian Arabs “the two-state solution” is phase one of possessing Palestine period.
I agree with Ms. Bederman that we must make the case that San Remo and the Palestine Mandate mandate Palestine west of the River, the land of Israel, as the Jewish national home, that it’s not “occupied,” not “disputed,” but Ours.
But we can’t stop there. We have to make two further points.
*** We have to make a physical presence connection between ancient Israelites and Israelis today, that our people’s continuous homeland presence all through the exclusively foreign (and mostly non-Arab) rule centuries between Judaea’s fall and Israel’s independence in 1948 as the land’s next native state wrote, as historian Parkes put it, today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”
We can do this. “Trust me, I wrote a book on it,” Israel 3000 Years. In a nutshell, the Romans did not “exile” Judaea’s surviving Jews. Roman-Byzantine period synagogues all over the land attest to this, as does the writings then of the Mishnah and then Palestinian Talmud, Roman recognition of the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jewish community until the fifth century, and twenty thousand or more homeland Jews fighting alongside the invading Persians in 614. Bahat, in The Forgotten Generations, has a map of a hundred Jewish communities during 800’s Abbasid dynasty rule. The Crusaders acknowledged homeland Jews fighting them courageously in Jerusalem and Haifa (and historians say likely elsewhere). The Crusaders were followed by non-Arab Mamluks for two centuries and then non-Arab Turks for four. Jews dwelt for long periods in their four holy cities – Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron – and elsewhere in the land. But for massacres of homeland Jews by Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders and Muslims, and barriers to Jewish immigration from medieval European prohibitions of “transport of Jews to the East” through the before-during-and-after-the Holocaust anti-Jewish British blockade and p rohibition of Jewish land purchase in most of the land, there would have been a hell of a lot more Jews there in 1948. And, even so, the land’s 1948 population was about a million Arabs (that’s all) and over 600,000 Jews, who’d again been the majority in Jerusalem since 1800’s Ottoman rule. Indeed, per Mark Twain and many others, the Turks misrule had driven the early 1800’s population down to less than a quarter million, its lowest of all recorded times. (So “a land without a people” isn’t so false as deniers of that reality claim.)
*** The second point we must drive home to American and other western publics is that Palestinian Arabs are not being “unbearably suffocated” by the Jews. They are the big majority of Jordan, 78% of Palestine. Yes, many of them are descended from Arabs who left western Palestine in 1948, but in the wake of that Arab-invasion started war more Israel-absorbed Jews were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel. And these indigenously Middle-eastern Jews’ “non-White” descendants are Israel’s biggest population stream segment today. And, of course, Palestinian Arabs are the entire population of Gaza.
But that’s not all. Under the Trump peace plan, which both Bibi and Gantz accepted, Palestinian Arabs residing in Judea-Samaria (“the West Bank”) would have internal autonomy in a bigger part of that land of Israel area than where they live today.
The bottom line is the “two-state solution,” ripping from the Jewish homeland historic Jerusalem and the Judea-Samaria hill country heartland would be Jewishly and militarily fatal for Israel. We have to make our international treaty and continuous Israelites-to-Israelis physical presence case to American and other western publics.
This week’s almost 300,000 attendee event in Washington was wonderful, but as Jonathan Tobin rightly wrote Wednesday, JNS, 11/15/23, Stopping Anti-Semitism Needs More Than a Successful Rally. He subtitled: “The ‘March for Israel’ in Washington, D.C., was a great response to pro-Hamas mobs. But ending the source of a rising tide of Jew-hatred requires opposing the woke ideology that created it.”
Jonathan rightly recognizes that not just anti-Semitism in the US, but the Jewish homeland’s very existence is at stake:
“By inaccurately defining all of Israel – and not just Judea and Samaria or Jerusalem = as a ‘colonial’ enterprise could so many academics and the generation that has been indoctrinated in their neo-Marxist lies about the world be led to believe that the one Jewish state has no right to exist. The lunacy required to believe that Islamist terror is part of a necessary process to ‘de-colonize’ the world is entirely dependent on a willingness to swallow the CRT mindset that erases the fact that the Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel.”
So what role is there in this for we grassroots American Jews?
[1] Purge from our mouths not just “occupation” but the entire lexicon of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing poisoned pejoratives. See “Toxic Terms” and “Dirty Words” and our video, “Ten Misleading Media Expressions” on our website, www.factsonisrael.com.
[2] Openly make the case of the fact, as Jonathan puts it, “that the Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel.”
[3] Patronize educational institutions, news media and other enterprises that respect Jews and Israel.
[4] Counter the “Squad’s” pressure on politicians to weaken Israel support, and make clear to them that the “two-state solution” would be Jewishly and militarily fatal for Israel. Make the case that internal autonomy in a generous portion of Judea-Samaria, along with majority population in Jordan, and entirety in Gaza, is equitable and not “unbearably suffocating” to Palestinian Arabs.