#902 5/6/18 – This Week: Answering Abbas’ Main Claim that “Palestine is Arab, Not Jewish”

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Everybody – including J Street and The New York Times – howled at Abbas for blaming Jews for the Holocaust, for which he apologized.  But the deepest damage he does is denying the Jewish homeland claim, a denial to which we gratuitously lend credibility through Jewish homeland delegitimizing terms which we ourselves use.

This Week:  Answering Abbas’ Main Claim that “Palestine is Arab, Not Jewish”

Ok, so, in response to “diverse condemnations” including from the New York Times, J Street and others, Palestinian Arab leader Mahmoud Abbas has apologized for comments in his recent speech blaming Jews for the Holocaust.  But, wrote Ben Cohen in a JNS article, “Time To Abandon the ‘Original Sin’ Theory,” yesterday, “there’s a deeper point about the Palestinian Authority leader’s remarks to the Palestinian National Council that is still to be grasped.”

That deeper point, says the sub-head of Cohen’s JNS article, is that

“It is not possible to separate Abbas’ grotesque views about supposed Jewish culpability for the Holocaust from his equally grotesque views about the origins of the State of Israel.”

Abbas, says Cohen, “is perhaps the best-known exponent of the ‘original sin’ theory of how Israel came into being,” which holds that “Zionist settlers ‘invaded’ Palestine a century ago” to “extinguish its Arab national character so as to make way for a foreign people with no historical connection to the land.”

In the same vein, a United With Israel article this morning quoted former Knesset member Einat Wilf, that according to Abbas:

“For Palestinians, there is no such thing as a Jewish PEOPLE.  There are only those of Jewish FAITH.  Those can be awarded respect, as long as they do not insist on their right, AS A PEOPLE, to a sovereign state in their ancestral homeland.”   [Capitalization original]

For us, there is no substitute for making the Jewish homeland claim as clearly, simply and straight-forwardly as delegitimizers of the Jewish homeland disparage it.  We will not get there through ourselves

***  calling Palestinian Arabs “THE Palestinians”;

***  calling Judea and Samaria “The West Bank”;

***  calling historic Jerusalem “East” Jerusalem;

*** calling rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel, as the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, the “1948 founding” and “creation” of Israel, as though artificially and out of the blue;

***  calling the 1948 multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction [btw, thrown back by a homeland army of homeland Jews] “the war that followed Israel’s creation,” and calling the Arabs who fled Israel in that era “Palestinian refugees of ‘the war that followed Israel’s creation’,” while being silent about that same era’s greater number of Israel-absorbed indigenously-Middle Eastern Jewish refugees from Arab lands [some 50% of Israel’s population today]; and calling the Arab-Israeli conflict’s two-sided refugee issue “the Palestinian refugee issue”;

***  calling the 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines, expressly declared in their defining document not to be final borders, “Israel’s [9-miles-wide in the middle] 1967 borders”;

***  calling Jews in “East” Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria “Jewish settlers,” in contradistinction to “residents” of nearby “Palestinian neighborhoods and villages”;

***  calling Judea, Samaria and “East” Jerusalem “Israeli-occupied territories”;

***  associating Israel’s “creation” with “compensation for the Holocaust,” and taking VIPs visiting Israel exclusively to Yad Vashem and not to a site vividly documenting thrice-sovereign continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel for three millennia;

***  talking about “exile” and “return” almost two thousand years later, and not about that continuous homeland presence; and

***  basing international recognition of the legal Jewish homeland claim to areas beyond the 1949 ceasefire lines on UN Resolution 242 not saying “the,” and not to San Remo and the Mandate embracing all of Palestine west of the Jordan [22% of the original Palestine Mandate after the excision of all-Arab Transjordan] as the Jewish National Home.

Straight-forwardly, clearly and as insistently and relentlessly as the Arabs claim the contrary, we have to assert these three points to the world:

[1]  Biblical history happened;

[2]  Including through tenacious [British historian Parkes’ term] continuous homeland-claiming physical presence all through the foreign-rule post-biblical centuries [which Parkes’ assessed wrote our time’s Zionists’ “real title deeds”], the Jewish people never relinquished our land of Israel homeland claim; and

[3]   the San Remo Treaty, and the Palestine Mandate, which awarded 78% of the original Palestine Mandate to the Arabs, retained the remaining 22% for the Jews.  [Despite century-upon-century exclusively foreign empire rulers’ persecution of Jews in post-biblical Israel, and prohibition of immigration of Jews, down to that perpetrated by Britain, western Palestine’s 1947 population was c. a million Arabs, that’s all, and 600,000 Jews.]