This Week: “Reframing the Middle East Narrative”
This week (6/8/18), Melanie Phillips hit, if not a home run, at least a standup triple on melaniephillips.com with her blog post “Reframing the Middle East Narrative: My Ten-Point Guide.” She pleaded with “defenders of Israel in the court of public opinion” to move from merely “defending Israel against the calumnies being thrown at it” to proactively taking the attack to the enemy by, inter alia, “reclaiming the language from those who have hijacked it and inverted its meaning in order to twist the western mind.” Exactly.
Point #1 on Melanie’s list of 10 points that need to be forcefully made is “Support the Indigenous People.” #2 is “Stop Arab Colonialism,” and #3 is “End the Lie of Palestinian Identity.” That’s a big enough chunk for a weekly media watch to bite off.
Melanie says, rightly by me, that “the Jews,” not Arab “Palestinians” [those are Melanie’s quotes around “Palestinians”], “are the indigenous people of Israel”; that “Palestine” was “the insulting name given to Judea by the Romans”; that Arabs living there at the time of Balfour “identified themselves mainly as southern Syrians or else just as Arabs”; and that “Palestinian identity was [later] invented solely to rewrite history and destroy the Jewish claim to the land of Israel.”
Melanie rightly says that “while many others have lived there over the centuries, the Jews are the only people – as a people – for whom it was ever their national kingdom, and the only people still around today who had their homeland there taken away from them by force.”
True, but I think that we must go beyond that and forcefully make the point that following the Romans’ final destruction of Judaea in CE 135 [after four Roman-Jewish wars: 63 and 37 BCE, 66-70 and 132-135 CE, the latter two being major Roman empire wars], the Jews continuously and “tenaciously” [per Parkes, Whose Land, p, 266] remained in the land through the ensuing eighteen foreign rule centuries, writing the Zionists’ “real title deeds” [Parkes].
Following Roman destruction of what had been a twice-sovereign Jerusalem-capital Jewish state, including Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount [“Palestinian” propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding], for more than a millennium [Judah & Israel, Yehud, Judaea], a succession of mostly non-Arab foreign empires [Romans-Byzanties, briefly Persians, Muslim Omayyid-Abbasid-Fatimid dynasties, non-Arab Mamlukes for over 200 years, Ottoman Turks for 400] ruled the region including Israel. In 1948, Israel became the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.
The importance of our making our homeland case that we Jews are the indigenous natives who never left cannot be overstated. Such hope as we have of getting through to “the Left” in the West, including the western Left’s many Jews, rests in their accepting the historical reality of our nativeness claim. Instead, we join in calling the Arabs of Palestine “The Palestinians.”
But, is it true that we Jews never left? This haunted me to the extent that some years ago I researched and wrote a small book on it – Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine [www.pavilionpress.com, Amazon].
While you stand on one leg:
Romans-Byzantines: President Carter to the contrary notwithstanding, the Romans on finally defeating Bar Kochba did not “exile” Judaea’s surviving Jews. Second through sixth century remains of Jewish communities and synagogues testify to this. The Romans themselves recognized the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jewish community until the fifth century (finally dismissed, reputedly, for violating a ‘no new synagogues’ ban). Tannaim and Amoraim scholars wrote the Mishna and Palestinian Talmud. Twenty-thousand or more self-mustered homeland Jews formed their own battalions to fight alongside the invading Temple-rebuilding-promising Persians against the hated Romans’ Byzantine heirs.
Muslim Dynasties: Homeland Jews aided the seventh century’s Muslim invaders and were rewarded, including by being made guardians of the Temple Mount and rebuilding of their synagogue at the entrance to the Hebron Cave of Machpelah. Archeologists have constructed a map of over a hundred ninth century Jewish communities.
Crusaders: A contemporary Crusader account recorded that “Jew, Turk and Arab” confronted them at Jerusalem, of whom “the Jew is the last to fall.” Albert of Aachen wrote of Haifa, “which the Jews defended with great courage [for a month], to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians.” We know of Jewish communities in many places in Crusader times, and of defiant Jewish immigration despite Crusaders’ Jewish immigration ban.
Mamluks: Following Mongol invasions in the Crusaders’ wake, Turk-Circassian Mamluks ruled the region for over two hundred years. Immigration, including from the Inquisition, continued. My book includes a timeline of Jewish life in Jerusalem. Acre, Haifa and other places had significant Jewish communities.
Ottoman Turks: We know a great deal about Jewish life in the Jews’ four holy cities – Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron – and elsewhere in the land during the Turks’ four hundred years of misrule, which drove Palestine’s population down to its lowest of all recorded times, noted by Mark Twain and others. But during the nineteenth century, Jews again became Jerusalem’s majority population. They were not just pious paupers, but productive people of the land, as Charles Warren recorded. Before the Zionist movement began, the Yishuv [the homeland Jewish community] began to revive, breaking out of Jerusalem’s walls and founding new communities, Mikveh Israel, Motza, Petah Tikva, the land’s first modern agricultural enterprise, and schools. It was to an already reviving Yishuv that the Zionists came.
We can credibly make this case that the Jews never left and that the State of Israel is the land’s next native state after Jewish Judaea. And we have to embrace within this Jewish homeland case not just the area within the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire line “with mutually agreed adjustments,” but including, as of right, historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, Palestine west of the Jordan, in which Jews are indigenous inhabitants, not “occupiers” and “settlers.”