#835 1/1/17 – A New Year’s Resolution for Jews Who Believe Jewish History – Ancient, Modern and In-Between – Happened

 

A New Year’s Resolution for Jews Who Believe Jewish History – Ancient, Modern and In-Between – Happened

This past week’s new U.N. Security Council resolution on which the U.S. abstained wasn’t just about condemning “Jewish settlements.”  Proclaiming that the U.N.

“will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations,”

and demanding that

“Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem,”

what the U.N.S.C. did last week, 14-0-1, was to overrule post-Six Day War U.N.S.C. resolution 242 that intentionally did not demand Israeli withdrawal all the way back to the old 1949 9-miles-wide-in-the-middle “Auschwitz” ceasefire lines, sans the heart of Jerusalem.  I.e., the U.N. gave “the Palestinians” all of the disputed land, including, expressly and specifically, Jerusalem beyond “the 4 June 1967 lines.”  It’s all “occupied Palestinian territory.”  Indeed, it called for “the two state solution based on the 1967 lines” and mocked 242 by calling this “secure and recognized borders.”  (But, for the present, the “good news” is that this new U.N.S.C. resolution #2334 apparently was adopted in a manner that is not “legally binding.”)

The New Year’s Resolution that Jews who believe that Jewish history happened, that the Jews have legally and historically-grounded claims to the land of Israel, including Judea, Samaria and heart of Jerusalem, should make on this first day of January, 2017, is to get Jews to stop gratuitously saying the very words that were coined for the very purpose of disassociating the Jewish homeland from Jews.

I do not mean some of these terms.  I mean all of them, including those long-used universally, including by Israel and us.  To borrow a phrase from Trump, what have we to lose?  Acquiescence, even joinder, in terms delegitimizing our heritage has brought us what?  That very delegitimization this past week by the U.N. Security Council, 14-0-1.

As it happens, the very terms we ourselves have so foolishly abandoned have more, in at least one major instance at least thousands of years more, historical grounding than their delegitimizing replacements.

[1]  “Judea” and “Samaria” have thousands of years longer historical usage than “West Bank”

No Jewish (or Christian) supporter of Israel should ever say “West Bank,” any time, ever.

The mainstream media sometimes says that “Judea” and “Samaria” are the “biblical” names for “the West Bank,” but I have cited in this media watch, over and over, examples that “Judea” and “Samaria” remained in use as Judea and Samaria’s names all through the post-biblical centuries down to 1950, when Jordan invented “West Bank” to disassociate Judea and Samaria from Jews.  United Nations 1947:  “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River ….”

[2]  Palestinian Arabs aren’t “THE Palestinians”

The mainstream media sometimes says that the United Nations in 1947 sought to partition Palestine between “Palestinians” and Jews (akin to partitioning Pennsylvania between Pennsylvanians and Jews, the sometimes-planet Pluto between Plutonians and Jews), but the United Nations in 1947 sought to do no such thing.  Over and over, it said “the Arab State,” not “Palestinian State,” and “the Jewish State.”  The U.N.’s Palestine partition resolution even referred to Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples.”

Both Israel and almost all of us have bowed to referring to Palestine’s Arabs as “the Palestinians,” but in light of what that has now led to, 14-0-1 in the council of nations, the time has come for us to recognize that Hillel was right, and to reclaim the thousands of years of Jewish equity in the term “Palestinian,” coined by Rome in CE 135 to disassociate the Jewish homeland from Jews.

[3]  Stop saying “Settlements,” especially “East Jerusalem Jewish Settlements”

In today’s parlance, “settlements” is a dirty word.  The one time I saw my hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, refer to “Palestinian settlements,” it immediately withdrew it in a “clearing the record.”  The mainstream media delights in contrasting “Jewish settlers” in “Jewish settlements in the West Bank” with “Palestinian residents of Palestinian towns and villages” and “Jewish settlers” in “East Jerusalem Jewish settlements” with “Palestinian residents” of “Palestinian neighborhoods.”

It is senseless, to say no more, for both Israel and us to continue pretending that “settlements” is any more a synonym, and not an antonym, for “villages, towns and neighborhoods” than “West Bank” is a synonym, and not an antonym, for “Judea and Samaria.”

[4]  The 1949 ceasefire lines are not “Israel’s 1967 borders”

The 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire line, expressly defined in its defining document as exclusively such and not an international border, is not “Israel’s 1967 borders,” and every time we join the mainstream media and Jewish homeland’s foes in calling it that, or even just as “the 4 June 1967 lines” and “the 1967 lines,” the terms used in last week’s U.N.S.C. resolution, we join in imbuing them, perilous 9-miles-wide-in-the-middle, sans historic Jerusalem that they were, with more political gravitas than that of superseded-by-later-fighting military ceasefire lines that they were.  Call them the 1949 ceasefire lines that they were, less, not more, sacrosanct than the 1967 ceasefire lines by which they were replaced.

[5]  Israeli presence in Judea, Samaria and historic Jerusalem is not “Occupation”

 Last week’s U.N. resolution is permeated with “occupation”:   “… the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem …. the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem …. the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem …. the Israeli occupation that began in 1967.”

To those of us who agree with Minister Bennett’s repeated public assertion that “you can’t be an ‘occupier’ in your own home,” Israel’s adoption of the Levy Commission Report it commissioned would at least have put the world on notice that such is Israel’s position.  In recent months, we’ve seen agencies of the U.N. assign exclusively Muslim names to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount components, down to the al-Baraq wall plaza.

If we really really believe that homeland Jewish history – biblical, post-biblical and modern – historically happened, that the Jewish people has a real homeland claim to the land of Israel including historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, then we have to affirmatively and actively make that case to the world.  We have to begin by stopping calling ourselves “settlers” beyond “Israel’s 1967 borders” in the “occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem” and stopping calling Palestinian Arabs exclusively “the Palestinians.”  Lots of these dirty words showed up this week even in articles condemning last week’s U.N. resolution.  It doesn’t make the case and it doesn’t make sense.