#910 7/1/18 – This Week: Time To State Our Claim Squarely

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  We wonder what drives so many people in so many lands so often to single out Israel for criticism unfairly.  It’s partly because so many people see “the Palestinians” as the indigenous natives being maltreated by the newcomer outsider “Zionist entity.” Our often not-to-the-point counter-arguments have been rightly criticized by some of our own as not squarely making our case that the land of Israel, including Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, has been and is, historically and legally, the homeland of Jews.

This Week: Time To State Our Claim Squarely

Some time ago, a prominent Israeli, a cabinet minister, I think, said flat out that the arguments we often make (or the media says that we make) defending Jewish presence beyond, and sometimes even within, the 1949 ceasefire lines (“Israel’s 1967 borders,” to most of the world) aren’t grounded in fundamental Jewish homeland rights to the land, but are so removed from such rights as to amount to “the arguments of a thief.”

***  One such argument, advanced at least by the media as being advanced by us, is that Israelis reject “the Palestinian right of return” because the influx of Muslim Palestinian Arabs would cause Israel to cease being a Jewish state.  You can just hear Westerners dismissing this: “Well, if the place actually belongs to The Palestinians, then that’s just too bad for the Jews.”

***  Another inadequate argument is that “Israel’s presence in the ‘administered territories,’ until their final resolution, is lawful because Israel occupied these territories in a defensive war.”

***  Another, technically true, is that post-1967 war UNSC resolution 242, in calling for “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” deliberately doesn’t say “the territories,” so a full withdrawal was not contemplated.  (This is, or at least for a long time was, the American, interpretation, expressly not shared by much of the world, and even so it must strike most Westerners’ ears as legalistic.)

*** Another justifies Israel’s “creation” as a result of the Holocaust.

I cringe when I hear such arguments.

So I was much heartened by a Melanie Phillips blog post this week (6/25/18, “We must push back against the Big Lie people tell about Israel”).   Melanie cites a new book by two international lawyers, Israel On Trial: How International Law is being Misused to Delegitimise the State of Israel, which, she says, “comprehensively lays out both the justice of Israel’s actions and the staggering denial of international law by its tormentors.”

This book “makes clear,” Melanie writes, that “Occupied Palestinian Territories,” applied just now by Britain to Prince William’s visit this week to the historical parts of Jerusalem, “is false.  In law, the territories were never Palestinian and they are not occupied.”

Melanie’s citation of points made by the book continues:

     “In 1922, the League of Nations conferred upon Britain the Mandate to facilitate the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.  When Israel was finally restored [love that expression] as a sovereign state in 1948, it inherited those rights to all the land under the Mandate – including Jerusalem and the ‘West Bank.’

     “So when Israel took possession of east Jerusalem and the ‘West Bank’ in 1967, ‘it was taking physical possession of territory that – as a matter of law – already belonged to Israel.’”

This international law argument grounded in the 1922 Palestine Mandate forms half of the fundamental Jewish homeland equity argument.  The other half, which Melanie touched on with Israel in 1948 being “restored as a sovereign state,” is grounded in pre-1922 history.  The Mandate document itself referenced the Jewish people’s historical connection to Palestine.

There are two phases to this pre-Zionist historical connection – the biblical and post-biblical periods.  Both periods historically happened, and together imbue the context of the Mandate with historical Jewish homeland validation.  There is a continually growing trove of archeological evidence, far from all of it Israelite, of the substantiality and vibrancy of the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and of Second Temple Judaea.  As for post-biblical history, we make a great historical accuracy mistake in speaking in terms of “exile and return,” suggesting an absence of meaningful Jewish presence in the land between Hadrian and Herzl.  The historical fact is we Never Left.  British historian Parkes rightly asserted that the homeland Jews’ tenacious continuous post-biblical presence wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.”  I traced this post-biblical presence in my book, Israel 3000 Years, and I think it’s incumbent on those hooked on “exile & return” to learn about and reflect on the extent and significance of that post-biblical homeland Jewish presence.

When we see specific instances of the unending flow of unfair criticisms of Israel coming from all quarters, we wonder why so many people in so many places single out Israel and Israeli actions for vociferous criticism.  There are, doubtless, multiple drivers of this obsession, but a fundamental one is widespread belief, instilled by constant drumbeat, of “illegitimate” Israel’s “maltreatment” of “the indigenous Palestinians.”  The fundamental counter to this is not that “242 doesn’t say ‘the,’” but that both historically and legally the land of Israel – Palestine west of the Jordan, including Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem – has been the Jewish people’s homeland for three millennia, and that majority “Palestinian”-populated Jordan, carved from 78% of the original Palestine Mandate, is an existing, far larger than Israel, “Palestinian” state.