#894 2/18/18 – This Week: First Sign of Spring and Its Call on Pro-Israel Jews in the GOP and the Dems

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Preparations for baseball and mid-term elections awaken in February as first signs of spring. Pro-Israel Jews in both the Republican and Democratic parties have serious spring-training tasks this particular spring.  I suggest what to each.        

This Week:  First Sign of Spring and Its Call on Pro-Israel Jews in the GOP and the Dems

Everybody who’s not wild about winter finds in February his own first sign of spring.  When I was a kid, it was for me pitchers and catchers reporting to Florida for the start of spring training.  This week, it was the local GOP ringing my doorbell with petitions to get their picks on the spring primary ballot.  Of course, I signed, but that’s just the beginning, not end, of both Republican and Democrat pro-Israel Jews’ political activism tasks this particular spring.

(Two quick preface points:  [1] I’m not out here to try to mass-convert Dems among you to Republicans.  The five reasons for that are that it would be bad for America, Israel, the Dems, the GOP, and the Jews.   The liberal Democrat Dershowitz is right that support for America standing by the Jewish homeland of Israel must be bipartisan, and in America the party in power periodically changes.  And [2], my expression “Pro-Israel Jews” in the header above should be redundant.  I wish that it were.)

GOP

So, how do I feel now, having voted for Trump (and not because the Russians told me to do it)?  Relieved and nervous.  President Trump is the first in a considerable line of successful U.S. presidential candidates who turned out not to have been silently smiling when he’d said, as a candidate, that he’d move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital, Jerusalem.  It took some guts to do that.  And given the contemptuous reaction of even America’s closest European allies, is there anyone other than Amb. Haley (except maybe Moynihan) that you’d want today representing the U.S. in the U.N.?

Yet, we pro-Israel Jews in the Republican party have our work cut out for us.  It was, perhaps, inevitable that President Trump, who sees himself as the Consummate Deal-Maker, would forthwith challenge that consummate deal-making admonition that those whom the Gods would destroy they first set to making peace between the Arabs and Jews.

We don’t know exactly what President Trump has in mind, and it is reassuring that he has said that he will not try to force any particular solution, including a “two-state” solution, on the parties.  But even his embassy move statement came couched in caveats:  “We are not taking a position on any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty IN Jerusalem ….” (emphasis added)  And he has said of that action to reporters in Davos on January 25:  “ … Israel will have to pay for that.  You won one point and you’ll give up some points later on in negotiations, if it ever takes place,”

The twin problems with any internationally-proposed Arab-Israeli peace plan, even a relatively favorable one as a Trump plan is likely to be, are timing and substance.  Today, what Arab neighbor of Israel is calm and stable?  Syria?  Iraq?  Lebanon?  Egypt (and not just in Sinai)?  Jordan?  Arabia and Yemen?  Gaza?   And with their instability being exacerbated by Israel-destruction-vowing non-Arab Iran advancing the Shiite cause throughout the region?   But if not now, is there any time in the foreseeable future when it would be sane for Israel to retreat to even-a-bit-more-than-nine-miles-wide-in-the-lowland-middle borders to accommodate a second sovereign state in Palestine west of the Jordan, likely including part of Jerusalem?

But can you picture any internationally-proposed peace plan, perhaps even a Trump one, which does not include “a Palestinian state” west of the Jordan and redividing Jerusalem?  The sentiments of the rest of “the international community” were clearly expressed in UNSC resolution 2334, adopted, in the final days of the Obama administration, 14-0-1, with the U.S. abstaining – everything beyond the old, 1967-obliterated 1949 ceasefire lines, including historic Jerusalem, is “occupied Palestinian territory.”

In this spring that’s the start of the election season for mid-term control of the Congress, the task of pro-Israel Republican Jews is to convey to the administration and Congressional candidates that prerequisites to renewing “Israeli-Palestinian” peace talks must include at least removing foreign forces, most fully Iranian and “pro-Iranian,” from Syria and establishing stability there; defanging Hezbollah’s hundred-thousand missile fortress in Lebanon and keeping Iran out of Lebanon; evicting terrorist factions from Sinai; and restoring authority in Gaza to Israel’s “peace partner.”  Only then could Israel consider making further “concessions for peace.”

Dems

Pro-Israel Jewish Democrats have to work toward rebuilding broader support for the Jewish homeland of Israel in the national Democratic Party.   Among Dershowitz’s arguments are that if you support civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, etc., you should side with Israel and not with its enemies.  Fine, but I think we can say more.

A couple summers ago, I attended a small-group session with an Israeli rabbi who believes that what may appeal to Western liberals is getting across to them that the Jewish people is the indigenous people of the land of Israel and that “Zionism” is the Jewish people’s national liberation movement.  I think we should be incessantly making this history and international treaty-based Jewish homeland case whether it works with many liberals or not.  President Obama did not see Israel in this light.  In his Cairo speech, he linked Israel’s raison d’etre to centuries of persecution of the Diaspora, culminating in the Holocaust, not to indigenous Jewish homeland connection.  Perhaps, this helped spread misperception that Jews are not an indigenous Middle-eastern people, a misperception being further spread these days by Abbas’ statements associating Jerusalem with just Muslims and Christians.

A second misperception of Israel President Obama voiced in his Cairo speech, which may also have contributed to diminishment of support for Israel among Democratic Party activists, related to events in Palestine in 1948:  “It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding.”   This blaming of Israel for the Arab invasion for its destruction was echoed more recently by an account of 1948 delivered to “J Street” by Sen. Sanders (who was supported by a great many Democrats), which might have been delivered by Arafat.  Jewish Democrats have to counter this “nakba” misperception as well.

With specific regard to “peace plans,” Jewish Democrats should try to restore support in their party for post-Six Day War UNSC resolution 242, which did not call for Israel to retreat back to the perilous 1949 ceasefire lines.  In his first term, President Obama said in 2011 at the State Department:  “I believe that the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both sides.”  (A play on the very language of 242, with an admission that the “1967 [i.e., 1949] lines” were just that, mere ceasefire lines and not formal borders.)  And at the end of President Obama’s second term, the U.S. abstained on UNSC 2334, which likewise dishonored 242.

So that’s my gratuitous outsider plea this Congressional election season to Jewish Democrats: Try to restore broader support for Israel among leaders, candidates and rank-and-file of your Party; make the case to them that the Jewish people is indigenous to the land of Israel and that “Zionism” is a homeland people’s national liberation movement, not European colonialism or Holocaust compensation; refute the version of 1948 that outsider Jews evicted native Arabs; restore the status of 242, not the 1949 ceasefire lines, as borders’ basis.  All this in the cause of what Dershowitz, among others, rightly sees as the critical importance of bipartisan American support for the Jewish homeland of Israel.