#854 5/14/17 – This Week: Standing Up To Those Who Say We Have No Rights To Our Homeland

 

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Right now, there’s a lot going on.  President Trump about to visit, maybe or maybe not moving the embassy, maybe intent on restarting Israeli negotiations with an Abbas who’s mouthing moderation, Erdogan urging Palestinian Arabs and other Muslims to resist Jerusalem’s “judaization,”  Hamas’ new document condemning the “1948 occupation” of those who “came here” but have no rights to the land. 

 Saying we’re not “occupiers” of “Palestinian” places called “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank,” important as that is, is not affirmatively making our homeland case.  Jews didn’t “come here” in 1948, but are the indigenous people of Israel’s land (of which Israel is the next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea).  If you’re not a Jewish homeland history maven, my little book documenting an historian’s assertion that the Jews’ continuous presence wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds,” using words one non-historian layman uses to others, may be a start.

 This Week: Standing Up to Those Who Say We Have No Rights to Our Homeland

“We have heard voices which attack Israel for building Jewish life in Jerusalem. I must tell these people, for the last 150 years there has been a Jewish majority in Jerusalem. Even under the Ottoman Empire there was a Jewish majority in Jerusalem. Under Israeli `sovereignty, we continue to build Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people. There is no doubt Jerusalem is a microcosm of our ability to live together. And we will continue to ensure freedom of religion for all faiths.”

– President of Israel Reuven Rivlin to Archbishop of Canterbury, President’s residence, this week

Israel’s YNetNews (5/9/17), in quoting this statement of Israel’s president to the Archbishop, said that he was responding to comments attributed by the Palestinian Arab news agency to Turkish president Erdogan reputedly urging Muslims “to protect Jerusalem against attempts of judaization.” (See YNetNews, 5/9/17: “Erdogan to Palestinian PM: ‘Protect Jerusalem Against Attempts at Judaization’”).

With President Trump about to visit Israel and meet with Palestinian Arab leaders in Bethlehem, amid swirling reports of a looming major effort by him to restart talks between Israel and a suddenly “more moderate” in tone Abbas (see Arlene Kushner’s blog Friday); renewal of the periodic waiver against moving the embassy coming up; and a bill pending in the Knesset to declare Israel officially “a Jewish State,” the time’s right for us to make clear both what we claim and the foundation upon which we claim it.

Arlene Kushner on Friday succinctly summed up the Jewish homeland position:

“… a united Jewish Jerusalem, retention of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, identity of Israel as a Jewish state, and end of hostilities.”

As for what we are up against, Arlene, who I think is right, wrote that Abbas neither wants to make a deal remotely satisfactory to Israel nor has the power to do so.  And she quoted a leader of Hamas on its new document:

“We have reaffirmed the unchanging constant principles that we do not recognize Israel; we do not recognize the land occupied in 1948 as belonging to Israel and we do not recognize that the people who came here [Jews] own this land.”

Our response to this, not to Hamas but to people in the West (e.g., ‘West Bank’ cyclist Ken in last week’s media watch) who regard Israel as at the least “occupiers” of a “Palestinian East Jerusalem and West Bank,” must go beyond our simply saying, as fundamental as that is, that we’re not “occupiers” and that it’s “Judea and Samaria” and not “the West Bank.”  We have to make clear that Jews are not, as this Hamas leader put it, “the people who came here” in 1948.

Here’s how I put it this week to Jan of Ken & Jan, who took me up on my offer to Ken & Jan’s email group of free copies of my book.

Hi, Jan,

Two copies of my book, “Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine,” went off to you this morning.  Book rate.  Please advise if they don’t show up in the next 3000 years.

It is a source of deep disappointment to us that our homeland claim fares so poorly among liberals in the West.  I blame mostly us for not making that case more effectively.  I hope you will glean from the book the continuous historical presence aspect of our claim.  There is likewise the twentieth century legal side – San Remo and the Mandate, which I did not get into.

I agree with Ken that Jerusalem is at the heart of the conflict.  Some Arabs have written that Israel would die on the vine without Jerusalem, and I agree with them on that.  And from a defense standpoint, what kind of a homeland is a sliver nine miles wide in the most heavily populated lowland middle, sans Jerusalem, Judea-Samaria?  There was no peace 1948-67 when we had only that. It would be unthinkable from a security standpoint to retreat to the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines, but that is not making a case for it.  The case is the Jews have a stronger homeland claim to the land of Israel than do the Arabs (who have a “Palestinian” majority in Jordan, 78% of the Mandate).

Well, however you see things, I will value your questions and comments.

Best,

Jerry

What I would like to tell you this week is that my book – Israel 3000 Years –, which makes the case that historian Parkes was right that the continuous tenacious post-biblical homeland presence of Jews, “in spite of every discouragement,” wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds,” isn’t a dry compilation of demographic statistics.

Caught up in the Jews’ 3000 year homeland history are conflicts involving their times’ mightiest empires – Assyrians and Babylonians, Persians, Alexander’s successors, Romans including Caesar and Pompey, Byzantines and Persians again, Arabs and Turks, European Crusaders, Mongols, Mamluks and Turks again.

And central figures of the world’s monotheistic religions – Moses and Joshua, David and Solomon, Hezekiah and Josiah, Ezra and Nehemiah, Jesus, Muhammad’s companions who led the Arab invasions.

The inception of my book’s chapter one invites you to join me in this deepest of quests for peoplehood roots, commencing with the unsettled controversy whether the Israelites “arrived” by Conquest in the land of Canaan or “arose” out of the Canaanite population (I quote from both camps, but I root for Joshua.)  On biblical “authenticity,” I cite Herzog on the details of biblical battles, and archeologists confirming from ‘Ain Dara biblical details of Solomon’s Temple.  Then chapter 1 traces the Hebrew Bible and Passover commemoration back towards beginnings.

Chapter two, on the Jews’ biblical kingdoms, addresses the heated questions “Was there King David?”, and then, in light of the electrifying findings of the “House of David” inscription and what may be his Jerusalem palace, whether he was really a king or just a dusty hill village tribal chieftain whose descendants became kings.  It traces the northern kingdom of Israel and enemies’ steles referencing it, and argues with archeologist Finkelstein over how “Israelite” was it.  It traces the development of the key ‘YHWH-alone’ movement in the southern kingdom of Judah and how it shaped the bible that has come down to us.  It recounts Hezekiah’s lost war against the Assyrians, and Judah’s final destruction by Babylon.

Chapter three, “The Jews’ Second Temple,” picks up with those who never left and exiles who returned rebuilding the Temple in what was now the Persian province Yehud, and describes the influence of Hellenism under Alexander’s Ptolmaic and Seleucid successors.  It delves into the causes, conduct and consequence of the Maccabean revolt, and the expansion and character of the Hasmonean state.  It deals with the arrival of Rome, Herod “the Great,” and the magnitude and ferocity of the Great and Bar Kochba revolts.

Chapter four cites evidence – unearthed remains of communities and synagogues; religious works of the Tannaim and Amoraim, including the Mishnah and Palestinian Talmud; Roman recognition of the Patriarch until the fifth century as head of the homeland Yishuv; and twenty thousand or more homeland Jews in self-mustered battalions fighting alongside the 614 Jewish autonomy-promising Persian invaders, dispelling the myth that “the Romans exiled the Jews.”  It summarizes analyses of the extent to which the land remained the homeland of Jews.

Chapter five, “Christians, Persians, Christians, Arabs, Turks,” traces the last years of Byzantine rule; Jews’ aid to the invading Persians and then invading Arabs, the recognition for their aid they received; the fading of Muslim rule from Arab to Turk; and homeland Jews’ lives under the Ommayad, Abbasid and Fatimid foreign rule dynasties.  The chapter cites an archeologist’s map showing a hundred known Jewish communities during ninth century Abbasid rule.

Chapter six, on the Crusaders, begins with describing Palestine’s population mix when the Crusaders arrived.  It quotes Crusaders reporting that “Jew, Turk and Arab” confronted them in Jerusalem, of whom “the Jew is the last to fall.”  It quotes them reporting the month-long battle for Haifa, “which the Jews [standing alone] defended with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians.”  It quotes an archeologist that while we know only of Jerusalem and Haifa, “there is no reason to suppose that Jerusalem and Haifa were exceptional places.”  It describes Jewish life under Crusader rule and Crusader recognition of the land’s Jewish connection.  It quotes a pilgrim who came on the Crusaders’ heels, a millennium following Judaea’s destruction by Rome, referencing “the region called Judea” between the Jordan and Sea

Chapter seven, “Asians, Mongols, Mamluks,” commences with describing the waves of Mongols’ and Asians’ destruction in the Crusaders’ wake.  It then describes the 200-year rule of the Turk-Circassian Mamluks.  It includes a 1300’s to 1500 timeline, drawn from several sources, of events in Jewish life in Jerusalem, and cites references to Jewish life elsewhere in the land.  It describes immigration, particularly following the Inquisition in Europe.

Chapter eight, “Turks,” who ruled from 1517 until 1917, is the last full chapter in the book.  It describes life in the Jews’ four holy cities – Safed, Tiberias, Jerusalem and Hebron – and in Galilee farming villages and elsewhere in the land.  It quotes Mark Twain and others describing how Ottoman misrule drove Palestine’s population down to the lowest of all recorded times, to perhaps fewer than one hundred thousand souls.  The chapter describes the nineteenth century revival of the Yishuv, its establishment of outside-the-walls Jerusalem neighborhoods, farming communities, an agricultural school, and more, including Jerusalem again having a majority Jewish population, artisans, workers and scholars, far from mostly pious paupers, before the Zionists came.

The two-page final chapter nine recaps that continuous three-millennnia homeland history; quotes Herzl confiding to his diary that at the First Zionist Congress in 1897 at Basel he had “founded the Jewish State,” which he predicted that in fifty years everyone would recognize he had done.  The chapter then cites the U.N.’s 1947 Palestine partition resolution, fifty years to the year.  It ends with Ben-Gurion, standing beneath Herzl’s portrait, proclaiming the rebirth of homeland Jewish independence in Israel, and enumerating the Zionists’ long list of reasons therefor.  Yet, my book ends, we Zionists’ might have appended one reason more:  Our real title deeds had been written, in fire and blood, by the heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the post-biblical centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.

Without prejudice to negotiating with “the Palestinians,” we need to make the case that we are not “occupiers,” that we do have ownership rights to Israel’s land, and that Jews did not “come there,” out of the blue, in 1948.  If you’re not a Jewish homeland history maven, my little book [Amazon or www.pavilionpress.com], with its hundreds of footnotes citing and quoting scholars, but written, as I say in the preface, “using words that one non-historian layman uses to others,” may help you get started.