WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: I lit the Hanukkah candles each night, as our people has done for the past two thousand years. Few rituals we do exemplify more meaningfully our Jewish people’s claim to our homeland.
Reflecting on the Hanukkah Candles
I don’t know about you, but Hanukkah couldn’t have come at a more needed time for me this year. I’m not “religious,” but each year I light the menorah’s candles each night, reciting the blessings and reflecting upon the Maccabees’ astonishing wresting back of our people’s homeland’s sovereign independence from the imperial successors of Alexander the Great.
Today’s Israel came into being, not “because of the Holocaust,” but as the land’s next native state after Jewish Judaea through natural fruition into statehood by its people that had never relinquished its homeland claim, including through physical presence. But I doubt there’s a Jewish homeland-supporting Jew in the world who hasn’t since 1948 justly seen today’s Israel, with its Ingathered Exiles, as national embodiment of Never Again.
And so it was with devastating shock that we learned of October 7’s Holocaust-horrendous Hamas sudden pogrom, of the hours-long barbarously cruel carnage inflicted on men, women and children civilians, the taking of two hundred plus hostages of all ages, etc., etc. The United Nations officially failed to condemn this, the media of the world headlined vicious untrue claims of Israel bombing a Gaza hospital killing hundreds, hordes marched through the streets of the West, not least Europe and America, howling “From the River to the Sea” and Jews doing “genocide,” followed by university, including Ivy League, presidents, backed by trustees, professors and students proclaiming calls for “genocide of the Jews” allowable “depending on context,” and the President of the United States deploring Israeli “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza, accompanied by incessant reiteration of Presidential calls for a “two-state solution” that would rip from Israel historic Jerusalem and defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland, handing them over to a “Palestinian Authority” that plays “pay for slay” and differs from Hamas (which vows to repeat Oct. 7 again and again) only in vowing a phased as opposed to single-phase destruction of Israel.
What’s the role now of we grassroots American Jews? Here’s a clue. A Times of Israel article Friday, 12/15/23, carried by Israpundit, Israel Is Urging US Not To Talk Publicly About Two-State Solution, says what’s driving the US publicly to demand now, during the Israel-Hamas war, a post-war “two-state solution”:
“A US official confirmed to The Times of Israel that there has indeed been a multi-front effort to convince the Biden administration to tone down the public rhetoric regarding the need for a two-state solution, but they said that Washington has no intention to budge.
“’We have our own domestic politics and our global diplomatic standing to take into account,’ the official says. ‘We’re doing a lot for Israel, and they need to understand this is something we need to do.’” [emphasis added]
Addressing this very thing – American domestic politics – is something WE need right now to do. We’re not helpless. We vote, in strategic states, and contribute in political campaigns, way way over our weight. We have to make clear to the Biden administration that this “two-state solution” would be Jewishly and militarily fatal to our Jewish people’s homeland of Israel. Former Israeli PM Bennett is right: There’s no room in the small area between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea for two sovereign states. So I plead with you grassroots American Jews of the Democratic Party persuasion, make Jewish opposition to “two-states” vividly known to your party’s elected representatives.
But none of us, whichever our political party, can stop there. We have to offer a peace plan that’s equitable to both Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs. Here’s one that both Bibi and Gantz signed on to. And it’s similar to what Rabin, no right-winger, envisioned when he was Prime Minister.
This plan offers Palestinian Arabs internal autonomy in a substantially larger portion of Judea-Samaria than they mainly occupy now. It would be “less than a state” essentially only in a security sense. Israel would control security. The plan gives the PA four years to accept this, during which Israel would not apply Israeli sovereignty to that portion of Judea-Samaria. Israel would retain the security-wise indispensable Jordan Valley and historic Jerusalem. In addition to this substantially expanded Judea-Samaria area, Palestinian Arabs would still be, as they are now, the majority population of Jordan, 78% of the Palestine Mandate, and also the exclusive population of another part of Palestine, Gaza. (Ok, this is the Trump plan, and you can read the details of it in Amb. David Friedman’s book Sledgehammer, i.e., it was to the failed unworkable “peace processes” of the past to which they put that tool, and what pushed it at the time into the shadows, “suspending” application of Israeli sovereignty, was the even-better-for-everybody – and it seems Hamas thought so too – Abraham Accords.)
I hope you lit each night ending this Thursday the Hanukkah candles. Few things we do exemplify so meaningfully our claim to our people’s homeland – including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem itself, not just within the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines – than this ritual of our people that we’ve practiced for the past two thousand years. May it be an inspiration to us Diaspora grassroots in standing with our homeland brethren until Hanukkah comes again.