This Week: More With Ken and Jan
Recently, Ken and Jan, world-traveler American Christians whom I’ve known for a long-time went on a bicycling trip through Palestinian Authority-controlled areas and Israel. On their return, they sent a long email to friends, including me, recounting their trip in terms very much more empathetic to Palestinian Arabs than Israel. I quoted some of it, along with my response to the group, in #853, and a further response to Ken and Jan in #854. I’d offered group members copies of my book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, on which Jan and a group member took me up. Jan emailed me Friday that the books had arrived.
Perhaps, my characterization of Ken’s original email as merely “very much more empathetic to Palestinian Arabs than Israel” did not do Ken justice. I quoted him characterizing “Jewish Voices for Peace,” members of which co-cycled with him on the trip, as “a Jewish peace group working towards ending Israeli oppression of Palestinians.” He referred to the Western Wall as “the Wailing Wall,” to “the West bank” as Israeli “occupied territory,” to the Green Line as what “determines Palestinian or Israeli land.” He noted that “the Israeli section” of Jerusalem has “great public transportation,” but that “the Arab side of Jerusalem is poorly maintained and the buses are old and decrepit.” He related that “one day while cycling through a village on the outskirts of an Israeli settlement,” a young Arab boy began throwing stones at them. “A group Palestinian leader chastised the boy who then appeared very ashamed of what he did. He obviously had thought we were Israelis from the settlement and was voicing his hatred (frustration).”
I, and perhaps you, have two reactions.
First, I think about Ken’s complaint of those Jewish Jerusalem neighborhoods having newer buses, if that’s true, in the context of the long pre-State murderous mistreatment of Jews by Arabs throughout the Mideast, including in Palestine, including in Jerusalem, as detailed, e.g., by the late Joan Peters in From Time Immemorial. I think about the murderous mistreatment of Mideast Christians and Yazidis today. I think back, not that many years ago, to Jewish neighborhood Jerusalem municipal buses being blown up, including on one occasion two days in a row, with my hometown Philly Inquirer headlining (6/20/02) “Jerusalem Hit Again – And Militants [as if that’s what municipal bus bombers are] Promise More….”
But second, when I calm down, I lay some of the blame for what Ken and millions of other not anti-Semitic Westerners think about respective Jewish and Arab Palestine equities at the feet of ourselves.
The United Nations in 1947 called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples,” but today we join in calling its Arabs “THE Palestinians.” The UN in 1947 called Samaria and Judea “Samaria and Judea,” but today even we call it “the West Bank.” The 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement expressly defined the “Green Line” as a military ceasefire line exclusively, without prejudice to either side’s claims of international borders, but even we sometimes say “Israel’s 1967 borders.” Even we sometimes say “occupation,” and we almost always say “settlers.” Is it any wonder then that Western Christians such as Ken call the Green Line the border between what’s Israeli and what’s “Palestinian,” refer to a Jewish “settlement” near a Palestinian “village,” a kid from which understandably throws stones at the “settlers”?
I rail not just against our own gratuitous use of Jewish homeland-denigrating terms designed to delegitimize us, but at our unwillingness to base the Jewish homeland case not just on twentieth century international documents – San Remo and the Mandate, but as well on the continuous, tenacious homeland-claiming post-biblical presence of Jews.
So here’s my response to Jan when she emailed me Friday that the two copies of my Israel 3000 Years book had arrived:
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Hi, Jan,
I deeply appreciate that you’re game to take a look at a view of Palestine very different from the long-held perspective of very many honorable people in the West. I don’t ask you to share it, but accept that the centrality of the land of Israel as the Jewish homeland – the Promised Land …. – has been institutional to the Jewish people, as is said, from time immemorial, and that there is substantial down-to-earth historical basis for this connection, which the Arabs fiercely reject.
If you delve into the book, you’ll encounter a British historian/Christian theologian named Parkes. My book, as you’ll see, is a lay person’s exercise in documenting his assertion that the Jews’ continuous tenacious post-biblical homeland presence wrote “Zionists'” like me’s “real title deeds.” For “further reading,” you might take a look at Dr. Parkes’ book which so influenced me, “Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine.”
“Evangelical,” so to speak, as I am, I look forward to responding to such questions and comments you and Ms. …. may have. For the past seventeen years (really) I’ve emailed a weekly “media watch” not so much attacking the media for misportraying Israel, which it does, but pleading with Jews and Christian supporters of Israel to cease joining in using terminology designed to delegitimize the Jewish homeland connection to Israel. You are, of course, more than welcome to subject yourselves to it, and to a book I co-authored on anti-Israel media bias. But I’ll be more than content if you give my “Israel 3000 Years” a good look.
For now, let me leave you with this. Prof. Dershowitz, who is a liberal by anyone’s standard, stresses the naturalness of liberals in the West standing with Israel – women’s rights, gay rights, news media rights (even more abused by the far-left, by my lights, in the Israeli press than by the press in the West), democratic governmental principles, etc. Of course, I agree, but I believe the core foundations of Christian and Jewish religious and cultural connection and heritage run deeper than either’s with Islam.
My best to you and Ken,
Jerry
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