#801 5/8/16 – “Tunnels Along Israeli Periphery”; Homeland for 3,000 Years

 

This Week In The Inq:  The Washington Post vs The Facts:  “Tunnels Dug by Hamas Along the Israeli Periphery”

If you type “periphery” in a Microsoft Word doc and invoke the thesaurus, this is the synonym list that you get:

Margin

Edge

Side-line

Border

Fringe

Outside Edge  (emphasis added)

If you ask Webster, he’ll say: “1 an outer boundary ….”

Now here’s how the Washington Post, wordsmiths by trade, described what’s going on between Israel and Hamas in a short piece run by the Philadelphia Inquirer Saturday (Inq, Sat, 5/7/16, A4, WP) as an “Around the World” squib:

… The current round of fighting in Gaza began earlier this week when Israeli troops entered the enclave and began to destroy offensive tunnels dug by Hamas along the Israeli periphery.

These “offensive tunnels dug by Hamas” weren’t “along the Israeli periphery” – margin, edge, side-line, border, fringe, outside edge, outer boundary.  These tunnels extended under the border into Israel (e.g. AP in Inq, Fri, 5/6/16, A6).  That casts a different light on Israeli actions than if these tunnels, which are deep and well-built with extensive facilities, ended, as they began, inside Gaza.

Washington Post This Week in the Inq:  Sins of Omission

Wednesday’s Inq (5/4/16, A5) carried a full Washington Post article that the adult Jewish ringleader of the murder of an Arab youth in revenge for Arabs’ murder of three Israeli youths before the 2014 Israel-Hamas war had been sentenced by an Israeli court to life in prison plus 20 years.  The article noted that the two minors involved with him had received sentences, respectively, of life and 21 years.  The article also noted that the revenge killing had “shocked many here because of its savagery.”

What cried out for inclusion in this article was any comparison between this treatment by Israelis of Israelis’ murder of a Palestinian Arab versus Palestinian Arabs’ treatment of Palestinian Arabs’ murders of Israelis.  Sweets, anyone?

An Open Letter to You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly

I agree with the first half of what unsubscribers have emailed me over the years:  “The mainstream media will never change on Israel, so give it up.”

I agree.  We’re unlikely to get the mainstream media to change.  But what we can do is set up a very clear contrast between the media’s and Jewish homeland’s enemies’ terms and perspectives versus our own.

One big piece of this is reclaiming the language that we have allowed to become poisoned against us.  “West Bank” isn’t a synonym for “Judea-Samaria.”  It’s an antonym.  Say Judea-Samaria, like the U.N. itself did in 1947.  Don’t say that the U.N. sought to partition Palestine into “Palestinian” and Jewish states, but into an “Arab State” and a “Jewish State,” the names used over and over again by the U.N. in its partition resolution in 1947.  And don’t call Palestinian Arabs “The Palestinians.”  Call Palestine’s Jews and Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples,” like the U.N. did in 1947.  (And all-Arab Jordan was part of the Palestine Mandate.)

But there’s more to making the Jewish homeland case than calling Judea and Samaria “Judea and Samaria.”  And here, I think, British historian James Parkes was right, and the Zionists wrong, on how we should go about making our case.  I beseech you Gentle Readers, involve yourselves also in this part of making the Jewish homeland case.

Parkes wrote that we Zionists err in speaking of exile and return, that we leave ourselves open to unfounded claims that we displaced and uprooted a country that Palestine had become during the eighteen hundred year interim.  Instead, Parkes wrote in Whose Land? (p.266), that it was the “heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement,” that wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.”

In the face, e.g., of the former mayor of London saying this week that the “creation” of Israel was a “great catastrophe” and that Israelis should be moved to the United States, I’d go beyond repeating Dr. Weitzmann’s comment to Britain that Jews were living in Jerusalem when London was a swamp.  I’d add that Jews, as such, have been living in the land of Israel, the Jewish homeland, without interruption for over 3,000 years.  So enough of the “founding” and “creation” of Israel, in 1948, as though artificial and out-of-the-blue.

But can we really, really make the case that Jews, not as stray individuals, but as an organized, self-aware, homeland-claiming people, have really lived in that homeland for three thousand years?  I really wanted to believe it was so, and when the chance came for me, as a lay person, not an historian, to research and write a non-vanity-press book, as one lay person documenting Parkes’ assertion to other lay persons, if I could, I decided I would.

Let me regale you with the final two pages:

     This book has traced how the Jewish people arrived or arose in Canaan in the late second millennium BCE; how Israel and Judah careened through the Iron Age and finally fell to mighty Assyrian and Babylonian empires; how those who remained and returned to Yehud rebuilt the Temple, threw off Alexander’s Seleucid successors and re-established Jewish independence under the Maccabees-Hasmoneans, only to crash headlong into Rome; how the Yishuv survived and even flourished religiously during its ensuing Talmudic Age; how it joined militarily in Persian and Muslim Empires’ clashes with the Romans’ Byzantine heirs, and lived during the Muslim dynastic era; how the Yishuv militarily took on the invading Crusaders and survived the Crusader era; how it survived Mongols and Mamluks and 400 years of Ottoman Turkish oppression; and how toward the end of that benighted Ottoman era, the Yishuv burst into the sunlight of modern times.

     In 1897, with the Yishuv already breaking out of Jerusalem’s medieval walls, founding new communities, and pioneer immigrants of the “first” aliyah already at work reclaiming the Land by reclaiming the land, Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland.  Afterwards, he confided to his diary:

“If I were to sum up the Congress in a word – which I shall take care not to publish – it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish State.

“If I said this aloud today, I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it.”

And in 1947, fifty years to the year, through Palestine’s partition by the UN into Arab and Jewish states, everyone did.

And then, finally, in the lengthening shadows of erev Shabbat, Friday, May 14, 1948, an aging leader rose and faced an assembled crowd and, standing beneath Herzl’s portrait, began reading an extraordinary document.  It proclaimed the independence of a people in a place neither of which had seen such status since this very people had defended and lost its independence there eighteen hundred years earlier.  “His face shone as the passages rolled sonorously from his lips, and took on life and form.”

“The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people … Here their spiritual, religious and national identity was formed.  Here they achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance …wrote and gave the Bible to the world ….

The aging leader, Zionist to the core, read on that “exiled from the Land of Israel, the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of their dispersion, never ceasing to pray and hope for their return and the restoration of their national freedom”; that “impelled by this historic association, Jews strove throughout the centuries to go back to the land of their fathers and regain their statehood”; that “in recent decades, they returned in their masses.  They reclaimed the wilderness, revived their language, built cities and villages.”  The document cited the First Zionist Congress’ proclamation, the League of Nations Mandate granting “explicit international recognition of the historic connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and their right to reconstitute their National Home”; the UN Partition Resolution, and “the natural right of the Jewish people, like any other people, to control their own destiny in their sovereign state.”

All these foundations of Israel cited that day in that historic document were, as Sharef called the UN Resolution, “unassailable.”  Yet, the aging leader might have appended one more:  The Jewish people’s “real title deeds” had been written, in Blood & Fire, by the “heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.”

Verlin, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine (Amazon, www.pavilionpress.com)