WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Our response to intensifying demands that Jews and Israel agree to “a two-state solution” has to go beyond warning that this would create a terrorist state. We have to viscerally answer that the land of Israel is OURS.
Missing From Our Response to Intensifying Demands that Israel and Jews Agree to “Two-States”: Eretz Israel Is OURS
Those of us who’d thought that Hamas’ Never Again-defying horrendous attack of October 7 had driven an unneeded nail into the quiescent coffin of “the two-state solution” need not just start confronting that specter again. We have to focus on how we confront it.
Each week I virtually clip internet articles on Israel seeming to me fodder for that weekend’s harangue to my fellow grassroots US Jews that our people’s historic homeland needs our more fervent support. This week I clipped tons on Jewish reaction to intensifying international demands for Israeli and our acquiescence in “the two-state solution.” See if you agree with me that there’s a key piece missing from our and empathetic others’ response to it. E.g.:
Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board last week (1/18/24, “Can Biden and Blinken Read the Middle East?”) castigated US Secretary of State Blinken for having trotted out at Davos “the perennially failing solution to Middle East problems” – “Create a Palestinian State.” The WSJ’s response is that the Biden administration’s “two-states” pressure on Israel is premature, that “in its eagerness for a foreign policy success, it shouldn’t forget that the more thorough the Hamas defeat, the more room Israel will have to compromise.” Maybe so, but by me our answer to “Create a Palestinian State” is two-fold: [a] There already is in Palestine a Palestinian Arab-majority state, judenrein Jordan; and [b] Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem aren’t “occupied Palestinian territory,” but comprise, as the Palestine Mandate, expressly recognizing the Jewish people’s historic connection with Palestine, itself put it, “the Jewish national home.”
Republican Jewish Coalition
World Israel News ran an article Wednesday (1/24/24, “Jewish Republicans Castigate Biden’s Push for Palestinian Statehood”), quoting RJC leaders that “as long as the Palestinian Authority is still rewarding terrorist murderers through its massive ‘pay-for-slay’ subsidies and refusing to condemn the October 7th atrocities, it remains unfit to administer a Palestinian state.” Even the Biden administration speaks of “reforming” the Palestinian Authority, but even should that come to pass, that’s not the answer to “two-states.” The answer is that there is a Palestine Palestinian Arab state (to wit, Jordan), and that Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem aren’t theirs, but Ours.
And Palestinian Arabs are today the exclusive population of another piece of Palestine, Gaza; and were offered under the Trump plan, accepted by Bibi and Gantz, but sidelined by the Abraham Accords, signed by some Arab states sans a western Palestine Palestinian Arab state, autonomy (a state sans security control) in a bigger chunk of Judea-Samaria than where they mostly live now – see David Friedman’s book Sledgehammer. So, “the Palestinians” (who, btw, aren’t, Palestine’s Israeli Jews being Palestinian too, acknowledged as such during the Mandate) aren’t being “unbearably” (Obama), “suffocatingly” (Guterres) “occupied” by Israel.
ZOA
JNS ran an opinion article Wednesday (1/24/24, “Biden and Blinken’s Disastrous Plans”) by, let the record show, one of my heroes, Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, the sub-headline of which makes this valid point:
“The administration’s misguided idea of a Palestinian state would strengthen Iran and leave Israel weakened and encircled by Iranian proxy terror states and terrorist organizations.”
Indeed, but what we need right now to awaken more grassroots US Jews to more fervent support of our people’s historic homeland of Israel – not least in the face this week of “49 of 51 Senate Democrats Sign Bill for Palestinian State [and the other two agreeing in principle],” World Israel News, Thursday, 1/25/24 – is exactly what Philly’s ZOA chapter, under the leadership of my longtime friend executive director Steve Feldman, is doing (among other grassroots-action things) right now, running full-size trucks, he calls “information ambulances,” with full-size signs on their side panels, around greater Philadelphia, including, e.g.:
“Israel: Homeland of the Jews for 3,400 years! There is no ‘occupation.’”
Homeland Jewish History, All of It, Happened
Homeland Jewish history didn’t cease when the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 CE or defeated the Bar Kochba revolt in 135. Jews eventually became a minority in our homeland during the ensuing eighteen centuries of exclusively foreign (and mostly non-Arab) rule between Judaea’s final fall in 135 and Israel’s independence as the land of Israel’s (western Palestine’s) next native state in 1948. Eminent historian James Parkes (Whose Land, p. 266) asserted that our continuous tenacious homeland presence, “in spite of every discouragement,” all through those foreign rule centuries wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.” Samuel Katz quoted Parkes in his classic work Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, and so taken was I on its significance that I wrote my own book, Israel 3000 Years, tracing Jewish physical presence in Palestine from earliest second millennium BCE presence through our time’s Zionist movement. They weren’t just stray individuals or pious paupers mourning an ancient past. They were an organized, openly Jewish, working-people-of-the-land, homeland-claiming Yishuv.
Reject that Jewish presence in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem is “settler-colonial occupation” of so-called “Palestinian territory,” to be forfeited, if not “from the River to the Sea,” at least east of the 1949 ceasefire lines with the invader [Trans-]Jordan, in a misnamed “two-state solution.”