This Week: Good Articles on Arab Rejection of Jewish State, But We Must Make the Jewish State Case in Clearly Grasped Affirmative Terms
Two prolific commentators on the American Jewish community and Israel started from the same place this past week – Palestinian Arab refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist in any borders – but had different takes on it.
Jonathan Tobin, writing on JNS (10/20/17, “Liberal Jews and That Inconvenient Israeli Consensus”), took the view that “there exists a broad consensus within Israeli society” that Palestinian Arab political culture “refuses to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders might be drawn,” and that while both Bibi and his allies and “his rivals on the center and the left” understand this and reject more territorial concessions in the foreseeable future, “most American Jews” do not, and should stop pressing Israel to make such concessions.
The ZOA’s Mort Klein this Thursday (10/26/17, Press Release, “Media Failure to Report Abbas’ Fatah Aims and Statements to Never Accept & Destroy Israel”) extensively quoted Fatah statements and documents rejecting co-existence with Israel. “Yet, these astounding and clear anti-peace statements, signaling a refusal to deal with an Israel it intends to destroy, are routinely ignored in media reportage on the conflict. The general public thus has no knowledge of the true state of affairs.”
Both Klein and Tobin are right, but we – American grassroots supporters of the Jewish homeland of Israel – have to do more than lament what many American Jews are doing and what the mainstream American media is not doing. We have to make the Jewish homeland’s case – Judea, Samaria and historic Jerusalem (yes, yes, all beyond the old 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines) and all – to publics in the West. And just going around with copies of UNSC 242 and saying “Look, see, it doesn’t say ‘the’,” is not going to do it.
We have to make three points strong and clear:
[1] Biblical homeland Jewish history – including Jerusalem Temples that stood for a thousand years – happened;
[2] Following Judaea’s final defeat by Rome in 135, the homeland Jewish community, continuously fortified by return home aliyah, remained in the land as the organized, homeland-claiming Yishuv, all through the continuous, mostly non-Arab, foreign rule centuries, with modern Israel in 1948 becoming the land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea; and
[3] The State of Israel was not artificially “created” and “founded” after the Holocaust in 1948, but, through an historic connection to the land recognized by pre-Holocaust documents including Balfour, San Remo and the Mandate, is the natural fruition into modern statehood of an indigenous Jewish people that never left the land of Israel or the Middle East, and that it was a homeland army of homeland Jews that threw back the instant invasion of multiple neighboring Arab states.
The Arabs and their allies are good at making up slogans Western people can easily grasp – “Palestine is the Home of The Palestinians,” which this media watch cited recently, and “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.”
Just as we have to stop saying “West Bank … East Jerusalem … occupied Palestinian territories … Jewish settlements [vs. Palestinian villages]” etc. etc., we have to make our affirmative case in historically-grounded terms that are easy for today’s distracted Western publics to grasp.
“Jordan is [Arab] Palestine,” subject of Ted Belman’s recent conference, is one. Jordan was 78% of the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate.
“We Jews Never Left” is another. This is the point made by British historian Parkes, that the Yishuv’s tenacious continuous presence wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.”
And I would add: “Jews Were Palestinians First.” As Begin argued in his Foreword to the second edition of Katz’s Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in [n.b.] Palestine, we should not concede “Palestine” and “Palestinian” to Arabs. Otherwise, what’s the answer to “Palestine is the Home of The Palestinians”? “No, It’s Not”?