#888 1/7/18 – This Week: “Questions” Some Tour Leaders Pose to Their Tourists

This Week: “Questions” Some Tour Leaders Pose to Their Tourists

This week, a contact in Israel emailed me and some others some questions which organizers of tours “with a specific political orientation” to Israeli and Palestinian Arab-controlled areas pose in surveys to their participants, seeking our views on these questions.

Here are some of these questions and summaries of my responses on how to deal with them.  My overall view is that just as we should not accept use of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing “dirty words” (some of which we discuss on our website, www.factsonisrael.com), we should not acquiesce in frames of reference and debate that frame the issues against us.

“What is Zionism, and How does Zionism Differ From Racism?”

At least as legitimate is “How does anti-Zionism differ from racism?”, but picture these tour guides asking their participants that.

The Jewish homeland’s delegitimizers call Israel “the Zionist entity” to date the start of at least post-biblical Jewish connection to the land of Israel to the late nineteenth century.  It’s rather like the mainstream media insistently dating Jewish connection to “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank” to “their capture by Israel in 1967,” and mischaracterizing “Judea and Samaria” – Hebrew-origin names that remained in use all through the centuries, including by the U.N. itself in 1947 – as “biblical names for the West Bank.”

Israel is not “the Zionist entity,” but the Jewish people’s historical homeland, which they never left [really; eminent historian Parkes rightly wrote that the continuous presence of the Yishuv, the homeland Jewish community, wrote the Zionists’ real title deeds], for three millennia. Modern Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, every ruler in between having been a foreign empire invader (and mostly non-Arab at that).  There’s a grain of truth in the old quip that “Zionism” is a first Jew giving money to a second Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine.  Zionism has been a means for rebuilding the homeland and bringing persecuted diaspora Jews to it.  Katz in Battleground (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.”

I put it this way, in discussing the Crusaders’ twelfth-century rule, in my book on the Jews’ continuous homeland presence, Israel 3000 Years:

     “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 Yisrael 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.”

Liberals, who, alas, by-and-large empathize with “the Palestinians,” not we Jews, empathize with indigenous peoples’ struggles for their homelands’ redemption.  They don’t seem swayed by (true) arguments that it’s Israel that supports gay rights, women’s rights, democratic values, etc.  What might get through to them, which is important, is effectively making the case that the Jewish people is indigenous to the Mideast, to the land of Israel which it never left in particular, that much of its population today is descended from Israel-absorbed indigenously Middle-eastern Jewish refugees from Muslim lands (see “refugees” question below), and that Arabs – through Jordan with its “Palestinian-Arab” majority – have 78% of the original Palestine Mandate.

“’Greater Israel’ consists of many regions – ‘Israel 48,’ East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip.”  What are the legal and other differences between them?

This mocking “Greater Israel” from which the Jewish homeland’s minimizers would exclude us is every inch beyond the 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines, in turn inside the 22% west of the Jordan of the original League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate with its Jewish National Home and close settlement of Jews on the land.  “Lesser Israel” is these peoples’ ambition, just like by them it’s “Zionism,” not anti-Zionism, that needs defending as different from racism.

Historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, Jewish Quarter, City of David, etc,, etc.) and the Judea-Samaria hill country heartland are not “Greater Israel,” but are intrinsic parts of the land of Israel, and we should reject this “Greater Israel” question’s effort at dismembering the land of Israel into “many [legally different] regions.”

There’ve been a trio of encouraging recent steps along the long road toward making the claim that the land of Israel is Palestine west of the Jordan [except maybe Gaza] is the Jewish national homeland, period, seem more realistic than just “wild-eyed Zionist” fantasy. One was the recent “Jordan is Palestine” conference, daring to question the sanctity of the inside-Western-Palestine “Two-State Solution.”  The second was President Trump’s recent statement, limited in scope though it was, that gave voice to the reality that Israel’s capital is located in the city of Jerusalem.  The third, reported on this week by Arlene Kushner in her email letter (“From Israel – It’s In the Air”), is that the Likud party has adopted an (admittedly ambiguous) statement, by the unanimous vote of more than a thousand members, “to work to allow unhindered construction and to extend Israeli law and sovereignty in all areas of the liberated settlement in Judea and Samaria.”

“What is the Palestinian Authority’s Role in Palestine, and How Is It Viewed by Palestinians?”

The U.N. in 1947 didn’t seek to partition Palestine between Jews and “Palestinians,” but between Jews and Arabs – “the Jewish State and the Arab State,” over and over.  It called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples,” and indeed, as, e.g., David Bar-Illan of the Jerusalem [nee Palestine] Post pointed out, the term “Palestinian” was more applied by the Jews to themselves than by the Arabs to themselves.  It’s time for us to take back Jewish equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian,” as, e.g., Begin argued in his Foreword to the second edition of Battleground, and stop subjecting everyone, even us, to characterizing the struggle for Palestine as one between “Jews and Palestinians.”

“Refugees: 1948, 1967, and continuing”

Do you think that in framing this question as “… and continuing,” these tour guides were embracing therein the greater number of Israel-absorbed indigenously  Middle-eastern Jewish refugees from vast Muslim lands in that time frame than Arabs – whose descendants are still isolated today by their fellow Arab “hosts,” even in a Palestine some never left, still supported by UNRWA – who left tiny Israel?  My guess is that most of these tour guides’ tourists don’t even know that there’d been these indigenously Middle-eastern Jewish refugees and that Israel absorbed them, not only more than offsetting the Arabs’ refugee claim but giving the lie to the Muslim claim that “a catastrophe to the Jews [maybe] happened in Europe, so why should The Palestinians suffer?”  Whose fault is this?  Partly ours, but lately we seem to be getting over it, making these Middle-eastern Jewish refugees, and Israel’s absorption of them, known to the world.

“How easy would it be to implement a two-state solution?  What would it require?  Aside from two states, what other solutions are there?”

One thing you can bet these tour guides’ tourists don’t appreciate is that it’s the Palestinian Arab side that has Never accepted the U.S.-cum-Israeli definition of “two states” – two states for two peoples.  Implementing “two states” west of the Jordan would require Palestinian Arab recognition of that.  DHYB.  But two-states-west-of-the-Jordan, even if less-imminently-suicidal to Israel than “the 1967 [i.e., 1949] lines with mutually agreed swaps,” would leave redemption of the Jewish homeland, after all that’s transpired in the past hundred years, spiritually along with geographically unfulfilled.

Equitably and increasingly realistically, there is the “Jordan is Palestine” option. I for one don’t agree this would ultimately force Israel into a “Jewish or democratic” choice.  [But if it did, Israel would have to choose “Jewish,” else what would its existence matter?  Recall Dr. Weitzmann lamenting the world was divided between places Jews could not live and could not enter.  Homeland Jewish history, not persecution of diaspora Jews, is Israel’s justification, but legal ability to take in persecuted diaspora Jews has to exist there.]

“How much ‘skin in the game’ do Christians have?”

Foreskin, but beyond that, there’s an arrogance here, also characteristic of some liberal Jews in the West, that they understand better and have a right, from their comparatively secure and comfortable homes in the West, to pressure Israelis on existential issues for them, such as on  “making peace.”  By me, with one exception, the Israelis can do whatever they decide themselves they need to do re Judea-Samaria.  They just can’t call it “West Bank.”