#900 4/22/18 – This Week: No, Natalie, Not Because of The Holocaust

This Week:  No, Natalie, Not Because of The Holocaust

Suppose a Hollywood actress who’d starred in three Star Wars episodes – “The Phantom Menace,” “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith” – just commented that “Israel was created exactly 70 years ago as a haven for refugees from the Holocaust.”  (See, e.g., hollywoodreporter.com, 4/20/18) You could dismiss her as knowing a lot more about what had happened a long time ago in a galaxy far far away than in her own time and planet.

But suppose that actress was a Jew born in Israel, had graduated Harvard University and while there had responded to a Crimson essay critical of Israel’s actions against Palestinian Arabs, had worked as a research assistant for Prof. Dershowitz, author of “The Case For Israel” and other books defending Israel, and had taken graduate courses at Hebrew University.  (Ibid)

The fuss this week about actress Natalie Portman, 2018 honoree of Israel’s Genesis Prize, is over her refusal to attend the award ceremony, which has hence been cancelled, because the Prime Minister of the country of her birth was going to address the ceremony.  Seemingly overlooked in the brou-ha-ha over that was the inclusion in her explanation of her remark: “Israel was created exactly 70 years ago as a haven for refugees from the Holocaust.”

No, Natalie, it was not.  That misperception is the basis for what, e.g., Iran says: “A Holocaust [maybe] happened in Europe, so why should The Palestinians suffer?”  Israel regained its independence in 1948 as the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.  Every ruler in between – Romans-Byzantines, Persians, foreign Muslim dynasties beginning as Arab but fading to Turk, Crusaders, non-Arab Mamluks for 200 years and then Turks for 400 – was a foreign invading empire, and mostly non-Arab at that.  The homeland Jews, who’d had biblical kingdoms, the Persian province Yehud and then the Maccabee kingdom Judaea, which fought four wars (63 and 37 BCE, 66-70 and 132-35 CE) against Rome, tenaciously stayed on in the land all through those long dark foreign rule centuries, as historian Parkes put it, “in spite of every discouragement,” writing our time’s Zionists’ “real title deeds.”

The army that exactly 70 years ago, as Ms. Portman put it, “created” Israel, did so by throwing back a multi-nation Arab invasion.  That homeland army did not come into being after the Holocaust.  The Haganah had been formed decades before as a homeland army of homeland Jews. The modern Zionist movement, the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo treaty, the Palestine Mandate, all centered upon restoring in the land of Israel the Jewish National Home, all preceded the Holocaust.

The party at blame here is not just Ms. Portman, but also us, that we allow such linking of the Jewish homeland’s sovereign rebirth to the Holocaust and persecution of the diaspora – whether by Ms. Portman, or by, e.g., Iran, or by then President Obama at Cairo – to go unchallenged.

Here, by me, are two examples of our folly:

[1]  Some years ago the leader of Iran gave a speech to the U.N. denying the Holocaust.  A few days later, Bibi addressed the U.N. as the leader of Israel, and gave what was widely regarded as a masterful response documenting that the Holocaust happened.  Granted, but it was the speech – not one masterfully documenting that the Jewish people has tenaciously clung, including through physical presence, to the land of Israel, including Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, for three millennia – that Iran had enticed him to give.

[2]  Israel religiously takes visiting VIPs to Yad Vashem.  Again, fine, but that tour should also include visiting a site vividly documenting the three-millennia connection of Jews to their land, at least rivaling in length and intensity that of any people anywhere.

If Ms. Portman, with all her heritage and academic credentials, thinks Israel “was created exactly 70 years ago as a haven for refugees from the Holocaust,” and we let that slip by unnoticed, we have a long way to go, and should get started.  A great pity is that Ms. Portman, who vigorously disassociated herself from the “bds” movement in her statement declining to attend the Genesis Award ceremony, could have been a powerful spokesperson for the Jewish homeland of Israel in a professional community and political wing where such spokespeople are sorely needed.