This Week: “Palestinians” Claim Jerusalem and Hebron at UN, Israel Takes Visiting India PM to Yad Vashem
The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations “Daily Alert” is an invaluable daily collection of distilled summaries of Israel news articles and opinion pieces from world media prepared by the respected Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. If you had to limit your inbox to just one Israel-news-and-opinion email a day, this would be it.
On occasion, the headlines of the articles summarized in that day’s edition combine to tell their own story. Here’s the story they told Wednesday this week.
First:
“UNESCO Again Denies Israeli Sovereignty in Jerusalem”
“PA Welcomes UNESCO’s Decision on Old City of Jerusalem”
“Israel and UNESCO: A New Era Has Not Yet Arrived”
“National Identity Theft at UNESCO”
“New Palestinian Attempt at UNESCO to Claim Hebron and the Patriarchs’ Tomb as a Palestinian Site”
Second:
“India’s Leader Kicks Off Historic Visit to Israel”
“Israel Welcomes Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi”
“Video: Indian Prime Minister Visits Israel’s Holocaust Memorial”
By all means, Israel should take visiting foreign dignitaries to its extraordinarily moving and telling Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem. Indian PM Modi this week: “I am deeply moved by my visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum. It is as much a poignant reminder of the unspeakable evil inflicted generations ago as it is a symbol of the endurance and fortitude of the Jewish people.”
But there is another symbol of the endurance and fortitude of the Jewish people that must be seared into the perceptions of foreign dignitaries visiting Israel, made searingly clear by that first set of five headlines in Wednesday’s Daily Alert quoted above. That other symbol is the tenacious, heroic endurance plus fortitude of the Jewish people’s continued homeland presence in the land of Israel all through the long dark foreign rule centuries between Hadrian’s final extinguishment of ancient Jewish sovereignty and rebirth of the Jewish homeland sovereignty movement symbolized by Herzl’s Jewish State just before our own time.
Eminent British historian Parkes put it this way:
“It was, perhaps, inevitable that Zionists should look back to the heroic period of the Maccabees and Bar Cochba, but their real title deeds were written by the less dramatic but equally heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.”
– James Parkes, Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine, p. 266
On the grounds of Yad Vashem, Israel should build a museum vividly depicting both the biblical and post-biblical homeland presence of the Jewish people in the land of Israel, and include visiting it, along with Yad Vashem itself, in visiting foreign dignitaries’ site visits. And, of course, just plain tourists should be encouraged to go there.
Some of the articles summarized in Wednesday’s Daily Alert briefly mentioned post-biblical Jewish presence over the centuries in Hebron and Jerusalem, but the time has come, I think, to face square-on the attack on the Jewish homeland’s legitimacy by “the Palestinians” and their allies. If you have any pals with access to the ears of Israeli officials, pass this on to them, will you?
PS: Some years ago, I was so taken by historian Parkes’ statement, which I found quoted by Katz in Battleground, that I wrote a book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, tracing that presence. It was every bit as heroic and tenacious an endurance, indeed in spite of every discouragement, as Parkes characterized it.