#870 9/3/17 – Getting Through to the Libs: Making the Case It’s Our Homeland

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  A rabbi from Israel made the point to a group I was in a couple years back that one way of strengthening support for Israel among liberals in the U.S. is making clear to them that the land of Israel has for millennia been and is the homeland of Jews.

There are three groups of Jews we don’t often cite who helped make up that homeland – the Yishuv that continuously remained through the post-biblical centuries, the western diaspora that continued to return all through those centuries, and the large component of Israel’s population today descended from indigenously Middle Eastern Jews.

Terms – like “Zionist entity” and Israel’s 1948 “creation” – that Israel’s enemies and sometimes the media and even we use convey perceptions contrary to millennia-long Jewish homeland connection, and we should contend against use of these terms.

Getting Through to The Libs:  Making the Case It’s Our Homeland

A couple summers ago, a pro-Israel activist convened a gathering of a dozen or so area Jews to meet with a rabbi from Israel.  The conference room décor was a little strange when we walked in.  Taped on the walls at various points were papers with different statements, each expressing an attribute of Israel – “a democracy, like the U.S. . . . . respects human rights . . . . historical Jewish homeland . . . .”, etc.

The theme of the meeting was nominally analyzing causes of relative lack of support for Israel among liberals in the U.S., but we talked about other stuff too, without seeming direction.  I was, truth to tell, dozing off, when the rabbi suddenly said: “Everybody stand up.  Go stand under the sign that best depicts the Israel case we can make that’s most likely to gain liberals’ support.  Almost everyone stood under “democracy” or “human rights.”  One other attendee and I stood under the “Jewish homeland” sign.

Granted this is opinion, not fact, but the rabbi pointed to that other attendee and me and said that such chance as we have for strengthening liberals’ support is getting across to them that the land of Israel has historically been the homeland of the Jews and that the struggle still going on there is that of a homeland people for their homeland’s liberation – a war of independence that is still being fought.

But I wasn’t thinking of just getting through to, e.g., political liberals and lay members of liberal Christian denominations in the U.S. when I got up and stood under that “Jewish homeland” sign.  The-land-of-Israel-as-the-Jewish-homeland needs to be at the center of the complete case that we make.  You Who Put Up With Me Weekly signed onto a media watch, and I would have you look anew at the language the media, our enemies and sometimes even we ourselves use that undermines perception of Israel as the historic homeland of the Jews.

“Zionist entity” is one such term our enemies use.  Beyond “Zionism” being inherently a dirty word in their book, the Zionist movement dates from the late 1800’s, and the attempt is to date the “Zionist entity’s” roots no further back.  Though Zionism was more than “a first Jew giving money to a second Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine,” it originated neither the goal of a reborn Jewish state nor of returning diaspora Jews there.  Katz in Battleground (rev. ed., p.97) put it this way:  “Modern Zionism did indeed start the count of the waves of immigration after 1882, but only the frame and the capacity for organization were new.  The living movement to the land had never ceased.”

That “living movement to the land” that “never ceased” during all the long dark centuries between Hadrian and Herzl is a powerful Jewish homeland-documenting argument that we don’t make.  I put it this way in my book Israel 3000 Years in discussing the difficulties of diapora Jews returning home during Crusader rule:

     “Despite the Crusaders’ ban on Jewish immigration, Jews continued to come.  They came, as Jews have always come, not as purposeless individuals randomly picking Eretz Israel from a map, but as a diaspora magnetically drawn by the homeward pull of the Yishuv.  Every Jew who has braved barriers erected expressly to him, from papal edicts banning ‘transport of Jews to the East’ to the WWII and beyond British blockade, stands not as a statistic in a demographer’s book but as living witness to Eretz as the homeland of Jews.”

Other Jewish connection date-limiting terms that the media throws around are Israel’s “creation” or “founding” in 1948, and its capture (sometimes, lovingly, “seizure”) of “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank” in 1967.  Off, by about 3200 years.

Beyond ignoring the significance of the returning diaspora, all through the centuries, to Jews’ claim to the land of Israel as the homeland of Jews, we ignore the significance of two other Jewish groups.  One is that of the ever-present Yishuv – the organized, openly Jewish, homeland-claiming community that, “in spite of every discouragement,” as historian Parkes put it, remained in the land all through the post-biblical centuries, writing the Jewish people’s “real title deeds.”  The other significance is that of the indigenously Middle-eastern Jewish communities of the vast Arab and other Muslim lands, who were no-less Arab-Israeli conflict refugees than the smaller [n.b.] number of Arabs who left what became tiny Israel.  That the Jewish state absorbed these Jews, while Arab “hosts,” including in Palestine itself, retain the Arab refugees’ descendants in “refugee camps,” does not convert that Arab-Israeli conflict’s two-sided refugee issue into a “Palestinian refugee issue.” But the great significance of these Jews, who have had grandchildren too, is that they contribute greatly to Israel’s indigenousness as a Middle-eastern land.  And Jews have been Jews in the Middle East for over three thousand years.

So stand under the “Israel is the Jewish homeland” sign, if you will.