WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: An unprecedented year-end for us to stand up for our people and homeland. Here are a few historical background facts that can aid in our doing so.
A New Year’s Resolution for Grassroots American Jews
EDITOR’S NOTE: This week’s #1197 completes 23 years of these weekly emails. I’ve been asked what’s kept me going. You. Your emails of encouragement of my efforts, while not always agreeing with my views, have made me understand that I’ve contributed to your thinking about and support of the fulfillment in our time of the Dream of Generations for the sovereign rebirth of our people’s homeland. I’ll try to keep going. My best wishes to you all, and to our people in our homeland of Israel, for a healthy and happy New Year.
When I began my public education at a remarkable place called the Henry School back in the mid-1940’s, my father, Max, bought me a multi-volume encyclopedia set, The World Book. It was handsomely bound and sits on my bookshelves still. A generation later my son, Max, assigned as his Hebrew school homework an essay on Israel, came to me with a long face. “There’s something wrong with your World Book.” “What’s wrong with my World Book?” “The State of Israel’s not in your World Book.”
And that’s just what today’s hardly new street-shouted slogan “From the River to the Sea” is all about – our Jewish people’s homeland’s place in the world book.
Do not discount from among the wellsprings of that Jewish homeland-delegitimizing chant the poison that’s been dripped daily for decades into Americans’ perception of Israel by our mainstream media.
Here’s the January 4, 2001, wire service article I quoted from the front page of my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer (Inq) in inaugural edition #1 of this Brith Sholom Media Watch, presented by its “Israel” committee chairman, me, to that century-old fraternal order’s Board of Governors meeting that frosty first Sunday of January, 2001:
“[Under then US President Clinton’s plan] Palestinians would have to scale back demands that nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants be able to exercise a right of return to land they fled or were forced to leave in 1948 during the creation of Israel. In exchange, Palestinians would gain ….”
Ok, in that BSMW #1 I went nuts: “It would be difficult to conceive of a more monstrous misstatement of history,” that there weren’t “nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants,” but hundreds of thousands; that they weren’t displaced by “the creation of Israel” but by an Arab invasion-begun war for Israel’s destruction; and that in that war’s wake more Israel-absorbed, indigenously Middle-eastern Jews were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel.
It hasn’t stopped. Check every few weeks with the websites of CAMERA and Honest Reporting. The slanted stories cited there change, but the media’s delegitimization of our people’s homeland of Israel rolls on unabated. (And see Lee Bender’s and my book, Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z, and video “Ten Misleading Media Expressions” on our related website, www.factsonisrael.com, and that site’s “Toxic Terms” and “Dirty Words” pages.)
What’s a grassroots US Jew to do? Make a New Year’s Resolution – “I will stand unapologetically for our people and its homeland of Israel – Jerusalem, Judea-Samaria and All – in 2024 and beyond.”
From ancient times through today, homeland Jewish history happened. Archeological evidence of ancient Israel abounds, but to cite just one key piece written in stone, our Temple Mount is still there. And there’s sound reason why there were slightly more Arabs than Jews there in 1948. Here goes:
Temple Mount
As for “East” Jerusalem Being “Palestinian,” as in UNSC 2334, and the whole Temple Mount being a “mosque,” as my hometown Inq despicably put it (5/24/21), our Temple Mount is still there.
I’m tired of reading printed statements by pro-Israel Jews that the Western Wall is “the sole surviving remnant” of the Jews’ Temple Mount. There’s more. Read Ritmeyer’s book Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (or, if you’re up for it, his full version, The Quest: Revealing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.) The Western Wall is a small segment of Herod’s Mount’s still-standing western retaining wall. In addition to the seven Herodian courses today above ground, nineteen more reach below ground (you can get a glimpse), and the wall extends to the south to Robinson’s arch and far to the north beyond Wilson’s arch and Warren’s gate. And there are extant exterior and interior remains including of the Double and Triple Gates in the south, and pre-Herodian (Hasmonean and even First Temple-time) standing remains in the eastern wall.
Nor is the Western Wall “Judaism’s holiest site.” That holiest site is the site of the Temple, no longer there, but which Ritmeyer makes “quite a good case,” as BAR’s Hershel Shanks put it in his Foreword to the short version, as to where the Temples had stood on their Mount and, astoundingly, what’s still to be seen of what had been in its Holy of Holies going back to the First Temple’s beginnings!
If you believe, as we Jews do from our very beginnings, in the Hand of God in history, believe this: the Temples were built on the summit of Mount Moriah, with that summit, the Rock, forming the floor of its Holy of Holies. When the Romans destroyed Herod’s Temple, they and their Byzantine heirs left its site covered with refuse throughout their rule’s centuries. Omar and the Arabs built the Dome of the Rock, revealing and preserving Moriah’s summit, on that site. The Crusaders came and disfigured the Rock, chipping off pieces for sale in Europe. Saladin-led Muslims defeated the Crusaders and retook the Dome before the Crusaders’ mutilations had reached the Rock’s very top. Ritmeyer scientifically photographically analyzed the top of the Rock from existing photos and the balcony under the Dome. His “quite a good case” includes identifying a measured slot still to be seen in that top as where Solomon had placed the Ark of the Covenant in the tenth century BCE!
1948 Population
That Inq wire service article I quoted back in these emails’ Alert #1 in 2001 and many others claimed that Arabs were displaced from western Palestine to “create” the Jewish state. But its 1948 population wasn’t exclusively Arab, but only about a million Arabs (that’s all) and over 600,000 Jews. (See, e.g., Katz, Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, p. 23.)
The Romans had not exiled the Bar Kochba revolt’s surviving Jews. Despite grievous slaughter of Jews in the successive revolts, they remained on the land, initially still the majority, attested by Roman-Byzantine era synagogues and other Jewish remains all over the land, the compiling of the Mishnah and Palestinian (Jerusalem) Talmud, Roman recognition of the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jewish Yishuv until the fifth century, and twenty thousand plus Jews fighting alongside the year 614 invading Persians against the hated Romans’ Byzantine heirs. The Byzantines regained control and went on a homeland Jew-slaughtering rampage.
The Jews aided the soon invading Muslims and remained during the ensuing centuries of foreign Muslim empire rule. The Crusaders came and massacred all groups, most proportionately homeland Jews. There were further persecutions and slaughters during the following six centuries of non-Arab Mamluk and Turkish foreign rule. And there were partial expulsions by the foreign conquerors, including by the Turks in World War I. And there were prohibitions on Jewish immigration, from medieval European bans on “transport of Jews to the East” to the before-during-and-after-the-Holocaust British White Paper, backed by an anti-Jewish British Palestine blockade, along with its Mandate-defying prohibition of Jewish purchase of land.
This week I received a reminder of a book written in Latin in 1695, Palestina ex Monumentis Veteribus Illustrata, by geographer, cartographer, traveler and philologist Adrian Reland, stating some revealing things: that the land in 1695 was sparsely populated, mainly by Jews, with Muslims mainly as seasonal workers. “The book completely challenges theories about ‘Palestinian traditions,’ a ‘Palestinian people,’ and severs the connection between the land and Arabs, who have even appropriated the Latin name of the land (Palestine) for themselves, despite it not having anything whatsoever to do with Arabs.”
Today’s Palestinian Arabs are no more “THE Palestinians” to the exclusion of Palestine’s Jews than they are descendants of Canaanites (though some credible archeologists, e.g., Finkelstein & Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, believe that we are), but we cannot ignore their claim to a home. They are the majority population of Jordan, sitting on 78% of the Palestine Mandate, and the exclusive population of another part of Palestine, Gaza. And were offered under the Trump plan, on which Bibi and Gantz signed off (and Rabin’s vision) internal autonomy in a bigger part of Judea-Samaria than they mainly occupy now. More than their fans offer us in “From the River to the Sea.”
More Background
In September I told you about Mike Pompeo and US Amb. To Israel David Friedman’s movie, Route 60: The Biblical Highway, which played in US theaters for a few days, but to even its producers’ astonishment, “sold more tickets on its first two nights than any other American film.” I saw it in an audience that seemed to me all but me Christian. I hope you caught it, or will if it comes back in some form. Movingly shows our connection to our people’s homeland, all of it.
As part of your New Year’s Resolution, I’d have you promise to read a moving book about Israel in 2024. I recommend Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate, “in the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmet” personal accounts of participants in the Six Day War, with flashbacks to earlier events. On the exceptionally moving events of Aliyah Bet, bringing home Holocaust survivors in defiance of the British blockade, I commend to you Yoram Kaniuk’s bio of Yossi Harel, Commander of the Exodus, Gordon Thomas’ Operation Exodus, and Nissan Degani’s Exodus Calling, and on a different ship, Arie Eliav’s Voyage of the Ulua. And on the Temple Mount, Leen Ritmeyer’s extraordinary – “quite a good case,” Hershel Shanks – Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.
Bottom Line
I cannot remember a year-end at which we grassroots American Jews are called upon so urgently to stand up for our people and homeland – ours, not “disputed,” not subject to dismemberment into “two states” – than this passing of 2023 into 2024. So here’s a New Year’s Eve toast I commend to us all – Am Yisrael Chai!