WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A morning-after’s first look at “take-aways” from Iran’s attack on Israel last night.
Last Night’s Non-Surprise Iranian Attack Nonetheless had Surprises
Unlike on October 7 and in the Yom Kippur War, Israel was not taken by surprise by Iran’s unprecedented launching at it from its own territory last night of hundreds of missiles and drones. Israel and America knew that attack was coming. Still, the night had surprises. One, thankfully, was that Israel’s defenses against incoming missiles and drones, aided by those of the US and others, performed beyond realistic expectation spectacularly, almost none of the lethal hundreds getting through. The other surprise was the participation in those defenses of Jordan. It of course wasn’t “Zionism,” but what was it?
A Ynet News article this morning explored this. The headline put it bluntly:
“Iran’s Attack Exposes Close Cooperation Between Israel and Jordan”
The subhead threw in qualification:
“Despite tense relations between the countries, Jordan prioritizes its sovereignty by choosing to prevent Iran from making it into a puppet state similar to its proxies in the region”
The body of the article mentions “Sunni Muslim Jordan,” with its role in Temple Mount Muslim holy places, likely being “shocked” by “images of Iranian drones and interceptor missiles flying over the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem,” launched by Shiite Iran, and Jordan’s economic arrangements with Israel on supplying it water for consumption and agriculture, and passage of trucks carrying fruits and vegetables across the River. The article soberly concludes:
“There is no dispute that Jordan’s significant alignment with Israel against Iran is considered a major diplomatic surprise. Despite this, it’s hard to believe a serious change in relations between the two countries will take place. The gaps are still large, and relations are tense.”
I recall that Jordan’s King Hussein said once that if Israel wants to be more accepted in the Middle East it will have to be more “Middle-eastern.” The reality is though that Israel isn’t the “white European colonial apartheid genocidal implant” its detractors West and East paint it. It wasn’t “created after the Holocaust,” but has had a continuous physical presence since biblical times sufficient, as historian Parkes put it, to write today’s Israelis “real title deeds.” Indeed, 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 mostly non-Arab at that). Israel’s Holocaust survivors came there as escapees (ask Bevin), not as colonizers, from Europe.
Israel’s population’s biggest ethnic stream is Mizrahi, indigenously Middle-eastern, largely descended from century-, even millennia-long, Jewish residents of Arab lands displaced from them and absorbed by Israel in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. And today’s sabras, mindless of whether you’re Ashkenazic, Sephardic or Other, are blending into ethnicity “Israeli.” Israel is as indigenously Middle-eastern as Arabia, and Judaism as Islam, only a millennium-and-a-half earlier.
The United States militarily stood by Israel last night, and though that was as well in America’s and the world’s (including Arabs’) freedom’s own interest, President Biden justly earns Jewish appreciation for that. But we cannot thereby lose sight of the mammoth difference between the President and many Democrats, and most Israelis and their Diaspora supporters like me, on his insistence on a land of Israel, western Palestine, “two-state solution.” We regard a western Palestine sovereign Arab state as fatal to our homeland of Israel, Jewishly and militarily. There exists an equitable workable alternative, the Palestinian Arab internal autonomy plan in a large chunk of Judea-Samaria, with full Israeli sovereignty and security control west of the River, enunciated recently by former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, in addition to Palestinian Arab population majority in Jordan and exclusively in Gaza.
Paradoxically, it may be that last night’s Iranian rain of missiles on Israel, defended against inter alia by Jordan, will prove a step closer to just peace than to just more war over Palestine. Let us hope that a visible realistic defensible divider of sovereignty in Palestine between Arabs and Jews, the Jordan River, will prove a reality.